Ages of the Geek
by mermaidNZ
Summary: When Alec Hardison meets Willow Rosenberg at a science fair, the friendship that develops will affect his future in unexpected ways. AKA "5 times Hardison crossed paths with other geeks". FANDOMS: Leverage, Buffy, Veronica Mars, Doctor Who, Heroes & SPN.
1. Chapter 1: Leverage & Buffy

**Story Introduction**

This series of interconnected _Leverage_ crossovers is an overgrown "5 times" fic (albeit in 7 parts!) revolving around Alec Hardison. Most of the chapters are set pre-canon for _Leverage_. _BtVS_ & _SPN_ are the key crossover fandoms, but you can read this story even if you aren't familiar with the other shows listed.

**Genre:** AU multi-crossover; gen, with mentions of canonical pairings.

**Summary:** When Alec Hardison meets Willow Rosenberg at a high school science fair, the friendship that develops will affect his future in unexpected ways. AKA, "5 times Alec Hardison from _Leverage_ crossed paths with geeks from other TV shows".

**Disclaimer:** any characters you recognise belong to the creators of _Leverage_, _Buffy_, _Veronica Mars_, _Doctor Who_, _Heroes_, _White Collar_, _Supernatural_ and _Angel_. I claim no rights to copyrighted material.

* * *

**Chapter 1: Leverage & Buffy the Vampire Slayer**

**Warning:** references to canonical character death.  
**Spoilers:** for seasons 1-4 of _BtVS_.

**Alec Hardison and Willow Rosenberg, 1998 – 2001**

Alec had been excited about going to Chicago to compete in the National Science Fair – it was the furthest he'd ever been from his Nana's home. The city was pretty spectacular, with the lake and all. But he wasn't impressed by how _cold_ it was, even in spring.

The heat at the venue was cranked up high, though, so he had to remove multiple layers of clothing once he got inside. The pretty girl whose exhibit was next to Alec's had also arrived all wrapped up, and they stripped off in unison. He picked up her mitten when she dropped it, and she thanked him politely. She had a soft voice, pale freckled skin, and long red hair, and Alec's heart beat faster when she smiled at him.

He usually got nervous around girls, especially older ones, but he felt emboldened by the nerd-rich atmosphere of the science fair. He introduced himself as Alec Hardison, a freshman from Atlanta, Georgia; the redhead said she was Willow Rosenberg, a sophomore from Sunnydale, California. Even her name was beautiful, Alec thought, but he wasn't idiotic enough to say that out loud.

Willow shook his hand, and then asked him about his exhibit. It was a good choice for an opening topic, as Alec was utterly at ease when it came to talking about computers.

His project looked at Internet transfer speeds, focusing on how to bundle and compress e-mail attachments so they could be downloaded faster. He had started it for entirely selfish reasons. In a house full of kids who all wanted to use the single phone line, it drove Alec _crazy_ to spend so much of his allocated half-hour online waiting for his e-mail to download.

Willow was an only child with a computer all to herself, so she couldn't empathize with the sharing thing. But she seemed impressed by his work, saying that she often had big files e-mailed to her by online contacts and that sometimes their contents were urgent.

Alec didn't know what a 16-year-old girl could be receiving that was so crucial, but he didn't ask. He had a teenaged foster sister, so he knew the penalties for questioning the importance of girls' social communication. If he went even a minute over his computer time, Sheena started whining about the phone call she was expecting. He'd tried pointing out that she spent all day with her friends at school, so why did she have to talk to them all night too? Yeah...that conversation hadn't ended well for him. Teenage girls could be _vicious_, man.

Willow's project was also about access to information, in a way. She was looking at how to improve the transfer of data from books to computer-readable format. Scanners existed, but were very expensive and irritatingly slow. Willow explained that she'd had a bad experience while scanning an old book in her school library. She didn't go into detail, leaving Alec to imagine hellish paper cuts, or all the letters coming out as hieroglyphs.

Anyway, it had motivated Willow to build her own handheld scanner; she handed over the prototype for him to examine. Alec thought it was incredibly cool, although he personally would have designed it to look more like something out of sci-fi (all shiny metal and flashing lights). In his opinion, futuristic technology should _look_ futuristic.

All the contestants had to sit in front of their colorful and carefully-lettered displays until the judges reached their section. Willow's exhibit was set up at the end of a long row; the exhibit on the other side of Alec's was something very complicated about microscopes, and the senior sitting in front of it never looked up from her biology textbook. So Alec and Willow talked to each other for most of the morning, kinda by default.

But spending time with Willow wasn't any hardship for Alec – he thought she was _amazing_. She didn't giggle, or talk down to him because he was younger, or look at him funny when he talked about computers. They had so much in common!

As the day wore on, Willow seemed to relax her guard a little. She admitted to accessing information that wasn't strictly in the public domain. Alec was awed: she talked about breaking into computer systems so casually, like it was real easy. But she seemed to have an odd fascination with urban infrastructure, like electrical tunnels and empty warehouses, which meant she often hacked into her town's official records.

Alec asked why Willow didn't use her skills to infiltrate more important or interesting targets, and got a surprising answer: she and her friends investigated strange goings-on in Sunnydale, because the local police were pretty useless.

"So, what, you're like the Scooby-Doo gang?"

Willow laughed. "Something like that, yeah. I guess I must be Velma!"

Alec wistfully thought that he'd _love_ to be in a crime-solving crew. He wasn't too good at fighting, and he preferred to run away from danger rather than towards it (so did that make him Shaggy?). But maybe he could be in charge of the technical side of things, saving the day with his computer. That would be so wicked.

Willow was a good listener, and it was rare for Alec to meet someone who spoke his language and might understand his ambitions. So over lunch, Alec outlined his master plan to her.

First, he had to make enough money to buy his own computer. He had an after school job at the local grocery store, but that was too low-paid to get him far. So he was going to establish his own business, helping people with their computer problems.

Alec was only 14, but he was real good at talking to adults. One of his previous foster-mothers was a Jehovah's Witness; she'd taken him door-to-door when he was a little kid, spreading the word. Nana also hosted Bible study evenings where Alec was expected to hand around snacks and be polite. If he could convince just a few of Nana's friends and neighbors that he could set up or fix their computer, quicker and cheaper than the professional alternative, then word-of-mouth would get him more clients.

Willow thought this was a great idea. She suggested that he use his skills at school as well, offering to help class mates with their computer studies homework for money. It might also be a potent form of barter with bullies.

"After all," she said, "jocks are less likely to hassle nerds who are useful to them." She sounded like she was speaking from experience. Alec, who at 5'11 was one of the tallest freshmen, didn't have too much trouble with the jocks. Mostly they just begged him to join the basketball team. But he could see how having some of the popular kids owe him favors could be real handy...

Second, he wanted to teach himself how to infiltrate computer networks. He'd already found some awesome bulletin boards and newsgroups, where hackers hung out and compared notes. He hadn't been able to spend much time on the sites, with Sheena tapping her watch behind him, and Nana didn't own a printer. But he'd picked up a lot of ideas. He had some firm targets in mind: the Georgia state government by the end of sophomore year (as a warm-up), then the White House in junior year and the Department of Defense by the time he graduated.

Willow commended him on being so goal-oriented, but asked him _why_ he wanted to access those particular computer systems.

"Why not? The Pentagon is like the Mount Everest of hacking," Alec replied.

"Sure, I get that. I'm just saying that you could do something really useful with your skills. My friends and I...we help people. We kinda work undercover, so we don't get much credit, but _we_ know that we've staved off the apocalypse for another week."

Alec laughed at the idea of a group of small-town teenagers saving the world on a regular basis. A couple of seconds later, Willow joined in.

As he finished his lunch, Alec thought about what Willow was saying. He did want the money and the fame that could come from being a computer genius (hello, Bill Gates!). But he could see that life might get a little boring after the first ten million dollars.

If he ever got mega-rich, he decided, he would devote some of his spare time and money to helping people. Sure, it was the right thing to do; more importantly, chicks totally dug generous rich guys.

* * *

Willow ended up winning the science fair's top prize for her scanner, and had several companies express an interest in producing it commercially. Alec didn't win anything, but that was OK. It was only his first attempt, and he was one of the youngest entrants. He'd be back next year with an even better exhibit.

When it came time to say goodbye, they swapped e-mail addresses. Willow also asked for his home address, which he gave her. The reason for her request became clear two weeks later, when a big envelope arrived in the mail for Alec. It was stuffed full of print-outs from the bulletin boards and newsgroups he'd mentioned, plus more he hadn't come across. It was, basically, a Hacking 101 textbook. It was the best present Alec had ever received!

Over the next couple of years, Willow and Alec stayed in touch by e-mail and via instant messaging. He told her how his installation and repair business had taken off, and how he'd been able to buy his own computer ahead of schedule. He'd even been able to afford a higher speed Internet connection (56K instead of 28K) and a second phone line. With Willow's help, he set out to bend entire networks to his will from the comfort of his bedroom.

They talked about school, their friends, and their future plans. With his kick-ass grades and his disadvantaged background, Alec hoped to win a scholarship to a top college. MIT was first on his list, with Stanford and Berkeley as fallback options. Willow hoped to attend an Ivy League school, but was also thinking of going to Oxford.

Willow told him hilarious stories about her best friends, Buffy and Xander, and about the stuffy British librarian (even for a self-confessed nerd, Willow seemed to spend a _lot_ of time in the school library!) who was dating her favorite teacher. She shared her grief when Ms. Calendar was murdered, and her apprehension about having to take over the teaching of computer classes.

She also told him about her boyfriend Oz, who was smart and funny and who played in a rock band. Alec knew that he had no right to be jealous; he and Willow were just friends. Still, it was hard to bear, because he'd never met another girl who got him the way she did.

* * *

Willow remained cagey about the extra-curricular work she did with her friends, but it was clearly a huge part of her life. This became even more evident during her senior year, when she had less time to chat and fewer amusing anecdotes to share. She said she was worried about Faith, a new transfer student who was causing trouble, but Alec was sure there was more to it.

It wasn't simple exam stress making Willow so tense and jumpy either, as he knew she could ace finals in her sleep. In any case, getting perfect grades didn't matter so much anymore – she'd decided to stay in Sunnydale for college. The change in Willow made Alec concerned; he asked what was going on, but she always downplayed the situation or changed the subject.

Alec was bored one day, and curious, so he ran an Internet search for the name of Willow's town. He got a surprising number of results from websites devoted to weird occurrences. It seemed that Sunnydale had more than its fair share of mysterious deaths. People disappeared without trace, horribly mauled bodies were found in alleyways, and several empty graves were discovered in the town's cemeteries each week. Willow's high school had a death rate comparable to a school in south LA or inner-city Detroit! Its last principal had even been attacked by rabid dogs in his own office, but the creatures responsible had never been found.

Oddly, the city authorities weren't doing much about the problem. The Mayor had been in office forever, and his father and grandpa before him, and he seemed totally complacent. The cops didn't appear too concerned either, giving obviously false explanations for the frequent bizarre events. "Gang members on PCP"? Yeah, right. Alec lived in a pretty rough area, and he'd _seen_ how PCP addicts acted. They didn't tend to bite people and drink their blood...

On the face of it, Sunnydale was plagued by kidnappers, feral animals and grave robbers. But some of the people posting online had a different interpretation: vampires, demons and other supernatural creatures.

Alec had faith in the things he could see or manipulate, like hardware and software. But he liked to think he had an open mind about pretty much everything else, up to and including the existence of God. So, while he hadn't ever met a vampire, he was willing to believe that they were real. Given the number of people in Willow's town who died from puncture wounds to the neck, vampires seemed to be an entirely logical explanation.

The more he read about Sunnydale, the more Alec wondered about what Willow's "Scooby-Doo gang" did exactly. If most of the weird stuff that happened in their town was supernatural in origin, then did they know that or were they fighting blind? He thought back over his many conversations with Willow, about the things she'd said and not said, and he came to the conclusion that she _definitely_ knew.

Damn! How cool was it that one of his best friends fought vampires? She was like Van Helsing or something.

Over the next few weeks, Alec spent most of his spare time on websites about folklore and paranormal phenomena. There were a lot of crazy folks out there! Some wore tinfoil hats to protect them from alien mind probes; there was even earnest debate as to which brand of aluminum foil was the most effective. But there were also some forum posters who came across as smart and reasonably sane: investigative journalists, grad students, novelists and comic book writers. Especially fascinating were the self-styled "hunters", who seemed to be the paranormal equivalent of storm chasers.

These people were all researching vampires, for whatever reason, and their discussions were by far the most informative and interesting. Alec learned a lot from reading their threads, but it was still a little too abstract for him. He wanted to hear about life on the vampire-fighting front lines.

* * *

When Alec next saw Willow on MSN Messenger, a rare event these days, he decided to just go for it.

_Hey, Willow...killed any vampires lately?_

30 seconds went by, and Alec feared he'd made a huge mistake. Then she replied.

_Uh, what are you talking about?_

Alec quickly explained that he'd been doing some research on Sunnydale and the supernatural. He assured her that he wasn't freaked out, or mad at her from keeping this from him, and he promised not to tell anyone else that vampires were real.

Finally, she agreed to talk about it – but over the phone, not via chat. Alec disconnected his modem, and a few minutes later the phone in his bedroom rang. It was the first time he'd heard Willow's voice since they'd met at the science fair, two years earlier. He was glad that he'd outgrown the squeaky-voice stage of puberty.

Now he had her attention, he had no idea how to start this conversation. He settled on asking, "So how are things with you?"

Willow sighed. "Well, it's been a quiet week here; just five vampires staked, and nobody tried to end the world. I even had time to study for finals."

Alec tried to imagine what it would be like, living in a town where five vampires and no apocalypse counted as a quiet week. Suddenly his run-down neighborhood didn't seem quite so bad.

Still, he couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "I think it's awesome that you fight vampires! You're like a _superhero_."

"Oh no," Willow replied, "Buffy is the one who does the hard work. The rest of us are more like her sidekicks...except we don't have to wear stupid costumes, thank the Goddess."

"The Goddess?" Alec echoed, confused. He'd thought that Willow was Jewish.

It turned out that Willow had another surprise for him: she'd been inspired by Ms. Calendar to experiment with magic, and was now quite an accomplished Wiccan. Alec had come across people online who claimed to be witches, and most of them seemed to be total kooks. So he asked how Willow could reconcile magic and science.

"They're actually more similar than you'd think," she said. "Spells have to obey certain laws, and you have to do things in a certain order. It's the equivalent of 'if-then' statements in computer programming." This totally made sense to Alec, and he thought – not for the first time – that Willow would be an _excellent_ teacher.

Willow went on to explain that, far from being antithetical, magic could actually work with technology. Case in point: she'd cast a privacy spell on Alec's phone line before calling him, like the one already in place on her line, so nobody could listen in or record their conversation.

"You can't be too careful," Willow warned. "There are people who don't want the truth about Sunnydale getting out...like the mayor."

They talked for another half-hour, with Willow patiently answering Alec's many questions. She told Alec about killing vampires: a stake to the heart, fire, or sunlight were the best methods. Crosses could ward them off but garlic was useless, which meant that all those Dracula movies had misled him. She also confirmed that ghosts were real (Buffy had been possessed by one!), and so were werewolves (Willow was dating one!). It was a lot for Alec to take in, but he believed everything that she said. Willow was one of the few people in the world that he trusted implicitly.

"So if there are vampires all over the place, why is Sunnydale so badly affected?"

"The town was built over a portal to Hell," Willow explained, "so it attracts vampires like moths to a flame. Um, except that vampires don't like fire, so maybe more like bees to honey. Oh, but wait...they don't really like anything sweet either, just the taste of blood. Maybe like mosquitoes to bare ankles in summer?"

Alec grinned. Maybe Willow was a vampire fighter and talented witch as well as a genius, but she still babbled like an idiot sometimes. It was reassuring, in a way.

* * *

They talked more often after that first conversation. Willow seemed relieved to have a confidant, someone outside the tight circle of people in Sunnydale who knew about what the "Scoobies" did. She revealed to Alec her sense of impending doom. It turned out that the town's mayor not only knew about vampires, but even had some working for him. Mayor Wilkins seemed to be a _seriously_ bad guy, either a demon or in league with demons, and a showdown with him was surely coming.

There wasn't much that Alec could do from the other side of the country to help Willow. The mayor's office was depressingly old-fashioned, with few computerized records. Alec hacked the system, just in case, but there was nothing there that revealed the mayor's plans. Seriously...was it too much to ask for a 10-point check-list entitled "My very easy plan for world domination"? Movie villains always betrayed themselves through arrogance and detailed record-keeping, but Alec guessed it was just another way that Hollywood had lied to him.

Partly to distract himself from events in Sunnydale, and partly due to the revelation that there were vampires _everywhere_, Alec decided to build up his physique. He knew he'd never be a kick-ass fighter, but he could learn to defend himself a little better. So he joined a kick-boxing class at the YMCA, and worked out in the school gym at lunch. This got the basketball team's hopes up, but he stuck to his guns: just because a brother was tall, didn't mean he wanted to play ball!

Alec also whittled his own stakes, and always kept one in his knapsack and another in his jacket pocket. Nana had looked askance at him when he announced he wanted to do some woodworking. Still, she borrowed a whittling knife from one of her church friends who was a real outdoorsy type. Alec loved the way that Nana accepted his weirdness, and didn't ask awkward questions.

Willow stopped calling a couple of weeks before the end of the school year, and didn't reply to Alec's e-mails. He grew increasingly apprehensive. When an explosion during a California school's graduation ceremony made the evening news, Alec wasn't at all surprised that it was Sunnydale High that had gone _kaboom_. The reports said it was a gas leak, but he knew better. He searched feverishly for a list of casualties, online and in the newspapers, but didn't see Willow's name mentioned. Considering that the inferno might have burned some victims beyond recognition, though, he couldn't relax.

When Willow finally called a couple of days later, Alec was incredibly relieved to hear her voice. She apologized for not getting in touch sooner – "it's been totally crazy here" – and told him what had really happened. After hearing the story, Alec readily forgave her. He figured that blowing up your high school to kill the evil mayor, who'd turned into a gigantic snake demon, was a pretty good definition of "totally crazy".

* * *

In the winter of his senior year, Alec decided to start a new science project: building something that could kill vampires. He wanted to help Willow and her friends, and also wanted a challenge. He'd already been accepted to MIT, with a full ride. While he had to keep his grades up to guarantee his funding, he was really just marking time at high school. Plus, he'd already hacked both the White House and the Pentagon, nearly a year ahead of his grand plan. He was bored now!

His intention was to design a small device that would emit light bright enough to incinerate vampires. Artificially generating light as strong as the sun's rays wasn't too tricky. The hard part was working out how to make the device fatal to vampires, but not harmful to the person wielding it or any bystanders.

He experimented with reflective goggles, and narrow-spectrum beams, but he just couldn't reduce the device's scope so it wouldn't hurt humans. The answer came to Alec while he was killing zombies in his favorite game, _Resident Evil_. Of course! Vampires were like zombies, but with a demon animating the corpse rather than an external controlling force. Without blood flowing around the body, dead tissue was surely very cold. So could he make something that was the opposite of a heat-seeking missile?

As Alec still hadn't encountered a vampire in the flesh, a fact that made him mostly glad but also slightly regretful, he asked Willow to confirm his hypothesis. It turned out that Buffy had dated a vampire (Alec was wildly curious, but didn't ask for details), and could report that a vampire's body was indeed colder than a living person's.

Alec needed one more question answered: were vampires always noticeably colder than their surroundings, even on a hot day? Ever the scientist at heart, Willow conducted an experiment. It turned out she had a guinea pig at hand: a vampire called Spike, who'd had a chip implanted in his head that prevented him attacking humans.

"Spike wasn't exactly _willing_ to help develop your weapon," Willow said when she called Alec. "But Xander had him tied to a chair in his basement already, so he was the most convenient test subject. I stuck a thermometer in Spike's mouth while he was swearing at me. When I told him that the alternatives were his earhole or his asshole, he clamped his lips around the thermometer and just growled instead."

Alec figured this consent process wouldn't pass any kind of inspection from an Ethics committee, but it got him the result he sought. Willow reported that Spike's body temperature registered at 40ºF, just above freezing point. This was despite the fact that the temperature in Xander's basement, with the tumble-dryer running and no air con, was a very warm 80ºF.

So Alec had to design something that could not only avoid humans, but actively target the super-cold spots in a room. He spent weeks formulating a device that he called a "light grenade". The first version, which he tested on himself, resulted in a few seconds of blindness. Being momentarily dazzled was a small price to pay for wiping out all the vampires in the vicinity, but he still wanted to refine it further. If any vampires somehow managed to escape incineration, they could take those precious seconds to kill the people who were trying to kill them.

Willow was an eager long-distance assistant; Alec called her Igor, until she threatened to set a zombie army on him! It was a joke, of course, but her magic was getting stronger all the time. He honestly wouldn't be surprised if she was able to raise the dead some day.

She had access to scientific databases through her college library, as well as Giles' incredible collection of books about vampires, so she sent him lots of useful information. For instance, it turned out that a magic amulet once existed that had the same effect on vampires. Sadly it was lost centuries ago, but a description of how it worked was quite helpful.

When Alec finally had a prototype ready for field testing, he mailed it to Willow. The next time Buffy discovered a nest of vampires, all lounging around in a boarded-up house waiting for sunset, she didn't rush in with stakes in both hands. Instead, she stood in the doorway and lobbed Alec's light grenade into the dimly-lit room.

To make it a proper experiment, Willow was there acting as a control subject. Willow wore the protective glasses that Alec had designed as a safety measure, but Buffy's eyes were uncovered. It really touched Alec that Buffy had that much faith in the invention of a kid she'd never met; or, rather, that she trusted Willow's judgment that much. Buffy had also argued that she could still fight with her eyes closed, so a few seconds of disrupted vision wouldn't be so risky for her.

An excited Willow called him that night, to report the results.

"It worked! Light streamed out of it in narrow targeted beams, causing every vampire in the room to burst into flames. Half a dozen vampires, wiped out in under 10 seconds."

Alec danced around like a grinning idiot in the privacy of his bedroom.

"There was a bright flash, but I could still see perfectly well," Willow continued. "Buffy says she was briefly dazzled, but her vision came back after she blinked a couple of times. It was just as well, because a couple more vampires ran down the stairs. They were too shocked to put up much of a fight, and Buffy quickly dusted them."

Together, they then brainstormed how Alec could write up the experiment for his science fair display; he couldn't label his project "My very easy plan for killing vampires", after all.

Willow posited that the light grenade could conceivably have a military application, if the US Army ever had to infiltrate caves or something. Soldiers who'd just clambered up steep mountains, carrying heavy gear, would probably have a higher body temperature than guys who'd been sitting around in the dark doing nothing. The light would incapacitate the enemy, facilitating their capture or killing. And it'd work better than a standard stun grenade, because its effect was more targeted.

Alec thought it sounded plausible. Even if America wasn't going to be fighting such a war any time soon, the military was always interested in what they called "blue-skies thinking". When he'd hacked the Pentagon's databases last year, he'd found details of some _very_ weird projects. There was an attempt to develop psychic soldiers, for example; the training included staring at goats, trying to make them explode. There was also serious interest in a "gay bomb" to make enemy servicemen crazy for each other.

* * *

At the science fair, which that year was held in Los Angeles, Alec's light grenade attracted a _lot_ of attention. Predictably, men in uniform – and a few in suits who were probably spooks of some kind – clustered around his display and gave him their business cards. It was nice for his ego, but he had no intention of calling them.

Interestingly, Professor Maggie Walsh from UC Sunnydale also showed up, and seemed very keen to talk to Alec about his project. Willow had told him about the professor's work with The Initiative, a covert government agency devoted to fighting and studying supernatural creatures. So Alec was careful not to give Walsh _any_ hint that he knew about vampires and demons. He didn't want to be recruited.

Alec won the science fair's top prize, fulfilling his last remaining ambition from freshman year. The commemorative plaque would look nice on Nana's mantelpiece, along with Sheena's high school diploma and Tommy's college basketball trophy. And the $2,000 prize money would help get him the best laptop money could buy!

After the fair, Alec had two days to spare before he had to fly back to Atlanta. He convinced his physics teacher that he had relatives in a nearby town (when Mr. Cameron called the number his star student had given him, Willow did a _very_ convincing impression of a respectable elderly aunt). Then Alec hopped on a bus and headed to Sunnydale.

It was so strange to drive through the nicely manicured streets and see all the landmarks of Willow's life: the cemeteries where so many vampires rose and then died again, the Bronze nightclub which had been attacked so often, and the charred ruins of the high school. Alec also noticed the truly remarkable number of churches for a town outside the Bible Belt. Willow had mentioned that the pervading sense of unease in Sunnydale caused many residents to turn to religion, even if they didn't know _why_ they needed the solace.

Willow met him at the bus station, with her girlfriend Tara in tow (Willow's coming out a few months back had been a shock, but she seemed very happy). Tara was sweet, gentle and reserved, and seemed like a good counterbalance to Willow's nervous energy.

After dropping Tara off at her dorm, Willow took Alec to a café on Main Street. There, he finally met Buffy and Xander. The three of them seemed to speak their own language, with many sentences starting with "Remember when..." and lots of obscure references and bizarre jokes. Still, they did their best to make Alec feel welcome.

Sitting beside Alec at their corner table, Buffy thanked him for his work on the vampire killing device. To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then, while her mouth was still close to his ear, she quietly told Alec the truth: she was the Slayer, chosen by The Powers That Be to fight vampires and the forces of darkness.

This actually wasn't too surprising to Alec. In his original research on vampires, two terms were often mentioned by those forum members who actually seemed to know what they were talking about. The Slayer: a teenage girl with super strength, rapid healing, and (usually) a short life expectancy. And the Watchers: mostly fusty old British guys who collected vampire lore and trained the Slayer.

Alec had wondered at the time if Buffy might be the Slayer. She seemed to be the leader of their little vigilante group, incredibly strong and resilient, and totally devoted to the cause. From Willow's description, Mr. Giles would surely have to be her Watcher. Alec had never asked Willow about Buffy, though, and she'd never volunteered the information. He hadn't minded being kept in the dark; he had figured it was Buffy's secret to tell.

So he thanked Buffy for confiding in him, and promised to keep her secret. Then he gave her a present: two new light grenades. With the addition of a tiny solar panel on one side, the improved grenade (version 3.0) was rechargeable. He figured it was a perfect fit for California, with its plentiful sunshine and focus on reducing waste.

Looking around the table at the three friends, Alec felt envious. The Scoobies had faced unimaginable danger, over and over, and yet they could still laugh and tease each other. Alec just hoped that someday, he would have a bunch of friends like this.


	2. Chapter 2: Leverage & Veronica Mars

**Chapter 2: Leverage & Veronica Mars**

**Summary:** Alec Hardison goes to MIT, pranks Bill Gates, plays WoW, and meets a geek girl called Mac.  
**Warnings:** non-explicit sexual content (Hardison/OFC) and canonical character death.  
**Spoilers:** for all of _Veronica Mars_ and _BtVS_.

* * *

**Alec Hardison and Cindy 'Mac' MacKenzie, 2001 – 2009**

**2001**

Alec felt a weird combination of right-at-home and out-of-place at MIT. He loved the nerdy atmosphere, where academic (over)achievement was the norm rather than the exception. It wasn't at all unusual to meet a fellow computer science student who'd built their own PC, or taken apart an electronic gadget to see how it worked. It was a welcome change from high school, where few people understood Alec's interests or appreciated his talents.

But in several other ways, it was a big shock moving from Atlanta to Cambridge. First of all, there was the weather. Alec knew before he went north that the Massachusetts climate would be harsher, but it was still hard to believe how _cold_ the wind was. His Nana had knitted him a scarf, hat and mittens, but he found that even his warmest coat was far too thin. In his second week at MIT, he got a job at one of the departmental IT helpdesks. He spent his entire first pay-check on a decent winter coat.

Second of all, there was his new and kinda uncomfortable racial awareness. Alec came from a city where most of the population was African-American, so he found it very strange to be at a college where African-Americans made up only 10% of the student body. And beyond MIT, the city of Cambridge was pretty white overall.

He didn't experience too much blatant racism in his new surroundings, but for the first time in his life Alec really _felt_ like a minority. He was used to being different, of course. In his neighborhood back home, he'd been labeled as a Weird Geek and as a Foster Kid. But he'd never been Black before, and it bothered him more than he'd expected.

The other thing that made him feel self-conscious at MIT was his accent; there weren't too many other Southerners around. Unfortunately, a few Northerners seemed to make negative assumptions about his intelligence based on his speech patterns. Alec knew he shouldn't let their prejudice bother him. But it was hard when he was a thousand miles from home, and desperately wanted people to respect him.

So he tried to tone down his drawl a little. Some of his classmates had fairly neutral newsreader-type accents, and he listened carefully when they spoke. Luckily, Alec had always been a good mimic. Putting on funny voices and clowning around was one way he'd made friends as a kid, when his Nana's advice of "just be yourself, honey" hadn't quite worked out.

Alec did manage to modify his accent enough that Nana noticed when he returned to Atlanta after freshman year. Of course, he couldn't help falling back into his old rhythms after spending the summer at home; it took a while to relearn his new manner of speaking when he went back to school. Eventually it became more natural, though he could _never_ stop himself from saying "y'all". That was just too deeply ingrained...

* * *

Undergraduate computer science turned out to be _very_ easy for Alec. Having dreamed for years of studying at MIT, he was actually a little disappointed! He was learning a lot of new stuff, sure, especially in the math and electrical engineering classes all computer science majors were required to take.

But in some respects Alec felt he was miles ahead of his fellow students. He just seemed to have an intuitive knack with technology that he really couldn't explain. He'd started learning how to hack at 14, thanks to his friend Willow, and he'd been fixing other people's computers for money since he was 15.

Even in a lecture hall full of very smart people, Alec quickly discovered that a key rule from high school still applied: knowing all the answers didn't always endear him to other students. So he settled into a pattern of responding when professors pointed at him, but otherwise keeping quiet. Nana would've told him not to hide his light under a bushel, but Alec figured that getting people to like him was more important than blinding them with his brilliance.

Fortunately, during the first semester there were a bunch of organized events for CS students to get to know each other. Unfortunately, it turned out that quite a few of Alec's classmates were those socially inept introverts with poor hygiene who gave geeks a bad rep. And many of the others had really narrow interests, which limited the conversational scope.

Alec could participate in lengthy discussions comparing various programming languages or operating systems, no sweat. But the arguments could get very repetitive, and nobody ever succeeded in changing anyone else's mind. It was like that _West Side Story_ movie that Nana loved, with the PC users as the Jets and the Mac-heads as the Sharks. At least the OS Wars didn't (usually) end in street brawls and multiple fatalities...

Alec did meet an awesome girl at one of the freshman CS parties, though, and it was listening to a heated debate about open source software that brought them together. Alec, having just rolled his eyes at Jin-ho's wild claim that Linux would be a suitable OS for super-mini-laptops, glanced across the circle of onlookers and caught a pretty girl watching him. She smiled at him, and rolled her own eyes in sympathy.

She was a seriously cute redhead, and she reminded him of Willow. Remembering how talking to Willow at that science fair had worked out pretty well for him, Alec decided to go for it. So he broke away from the Linux argument, and went over to introduce himself.

Her name was Melissa, and she was from Philadelphia. She declared straight off that she was a Windows user, with her hands on her hips and a mock "Wanna make something of it?" expression. Alec hastily assured her that he was too, and then offered to get her something to drink. After a brief misunderstanding over the definition of coke vs. Coke (apparently it was a Southern thing), they spent the rest of the night sitting in the corner talking. The conversation felt natural and easy – Alec hadn't had so much fun for ages.

It turned out that Melissa was also a huge Tolkien fan, so Alec suggested that they should see _The Fellowship of the Ring_ together the following week. Via a complex barter system, he managed to get his hands on two tickets for the sold-out 12.01am screening on opening day. Afterwards they found a 24 hour diner near the theater, and spent most of their meal discussing the movie. It was an incredibly awesome night.

He had to revise his definition of _incredibly awesome_ after their third date, when Melissa invited him back to her dorm, told him that her roommate was away for winter break, and led him to bed. Alec was unbelievably happy (and relieved) to finally sleep with a girl. Although he was inexperienced, and super nervous, Melissa seemed to have a good time as well.

The thing with Melissa was fun, but it didn't last. Over spring break, her high school boyfriend came to visit and talked her into getting back together. Alec was hurt by the break-up, but not heartbroken. And having had one relationship made him _so_ much more confident around girls.

He dated on and off over the next few years. In sophomore year there was Katie (engineering genius) followed by Monique (CS major); in junior year, he went out with Sandra (math student) for six months. Alec couldn't say that he'd met the _perfect_ girl for him yet, and he didn't take any of them home to meet Nana. But he figured that when the perfect girl eventually entered his life, she wouldn't mind that he'd had some fun and gotten a little experience under his belt...

* * *

Having grown up in a small house full of kids, one thing Alec really appreciated about college was the opportunity for solitude. His chem student roommate Lee, a pretty cool guy, mostly split his time between the labs and his boyfriend's dorm. So Alec often had the place to himself.

He'd tried to personalize his side of the room a little. There were photos of his siblings pinned to the bulletin board, and one of Nana on his bedside table. Alec called her every Sunday, but he still missed her so much. Sometimes, when the homesickness got really bad, he wished that he'd stayed in Atlanta and gone to Georgia Tech instead. Nana seemed to be psychic, though, and a long chatty letter often arrived when he was feeling down.

She also sent him care packages: a dozen of her amazing chocolate-chip cookies, a little jar of her famous peach jam, or some brightly-colored woolen socks. He already had more pairs of socks than he'd ever need, but she still kept knitting. So Alec hung up the extras in a row along his wall, like a rainbow of yarn. It made him smile every time he looked up from his computer, and Lee seemed to appreciate it too.

The walls of his room were covered with movie posters and pictures cut out of magazines. He had pin-up girls everywhere, but not the standard mostly-naked kind (Alec was a 21st century guy: his porn lived in heavily-encrypted folders on his hard drive). Instead, there was Storm from _X-Men_, Scully from _The X-Files_, Trinity from _The Matrix_, and several female characters from _Star Trek_. His prize possession was an original Princess Leia poster he'd picked up for 50 cents at a yard sale back home.

Alec had also started collecting publicity pictures from the new hit show _Firefly_ – especially photos of Kaylee, the super-cute ship's engineer and his favorite character. He'd fallen in love from the very first scene (the incredible battle flashback) of the pilot episode. With a crowd of other geeks, he gathered in the dorm lounge every week to watch the show.

* * *

Alec had deliberately decided to minimize his hacking exploits during college. Of course he still did little things here and there, to make life easier. For instance, he usually arranged a free upgrade to business class on his flights between Boston and Atlanta (it was damn hard to get comfortable in coach when you were 6'2).

He also helped his family out. Nana had gold-plated Cadillac health insurance, despite only paying rusty Pinto premiums! And when Tommy got a negative credit rating through no fault of his own (he got fucked over by a dodgy loan company), Alec hacked the records and made sure his brother's credit history was squeaky clean.

But Alec mostly steered clear of infiltrating government systems. Now he was legally an adult, the consequences of getting caught were a lot more serious. More to the point, he was getting enough mental stimulation offline these days; he kinda didn't _need_ the thrill anymore. And anyway, knowing that he could crack the Pentagon's security in a matter of minutes took a lot of the fun out of it...

In junior year, though, Alec got involved in a different kind of hacking: the grand tradition of MIT pranks. His friend Jin-ho, the Linux devotee, roped Alec into a small but perfectly formed hack. Bill Gates came to MIT to officially open a building named after him. Thanks to Jin-ho and Alec, though, all the computers in the building's lobby booted up in Linux instead of XP, and displayed the Linux penguin logo. It was _beautiful_.

Junior year was also when Alec got seriously into computer games. He'd worked all summer at an IT company back in Atlanta, and saved up enough for a fantastic new desktop. It had a superfast processor and a kickass graphics card, plus a big flat screen. Honestly, it would have been a criminal shame _not_ to use it for gaming.

Unlike some geeks who were fanatical about a single game, Alec had pretty broad tastes. He could spend hours playing a game like _Myst IV_, solving puzzles and exploring the beautifully realized world. But sometimes, he just needed to shoot bad guys and blow up aliens. FPS games were especially therapeutic after one of Professor Cohen's interminable systems architecture lectures. Reminiscences about 1960s-era mainframe technology belonged in an ancient history class, in Alec's opinion; Cohen was talking to students who'd never even _seen_ a punch card.

* * *

In fall of 2004, one of his friends got an advance copy of the new MMORPG _World of Warcraft_. Alec tried it out, and got hooked immediately. The combination of MIT's spectacularly fast internet connection and his great hardware set-up meant it was all too easy to immerse himself in the gameworld for many hours at a stretch.

One of the members of his WoW guild was a 16-year-old California girl who called herself 'Mac'. She and Alec really clicked, and soon began chatting regularly in-game and via email. They lived on opposite sides of the country, but they were often online at the same time since Alec tended to stay up until at least 3am.

It wasn't a sexual thing with Mac. She looked cute in her pic, but she was too young for him. It was more a meeting of minds. Alec liked her sharp intelligence and sardonic humor, and he really admired her innovative approach to fund-raising for college – that Purity Test scam was a thing of beauty.

Mac reminded Alec of Willow in a number of ways: cute geek girl, isolated at school, and with only a few people who really appreciated her. Mac also spent some of her spare time providing technical assistance to a friend of hers, who was saving the world one person at a time.

But Veronica Mars was a part-time private investigator, helping clients for money, rather than a vampire-fighting superhero like Buffy Summers. After all the supernatural drama of Sunnydale, it was a refreshing change to see someone addressing _human_ corruption, criminality and cruelty. And it seemed that Neptune, California had no shortage of such failings.

Mac and Alec also had something very personal in common: they were both raised by people who weren't their biological parents. When not engaged in their usual good-natured but snarky arguments (Apple vs. Microsoft, Diet Coke vs. the orange soda Alec loved, the proper interpretation of _Donnie Darko_, etc.), they sometimes debated which of them was worse off in the family sense.

Alec had been placed in foster care as a baby, after his mother died. He knew nothing about his mom apart from her name, Tina, and his father was even more of a mystery (he wasn't on Alec's birth certificate). Mac's story sounded like something from a soap opera: she'd been swapped at birth with another girl! She lived in the same town as her real family, but wasn't able to live _with_ them.

So in terms of a tragic origin story, it was kind of a tie. But at least both Alec and Mac lived with people who loved them, even without understanding them or their interests. He had his Nana, while she had parents who'd chosen her over their biological daughter.

Still, Mac often talked about counting the months until she could leave for college. Alec didn't blame her for wanting to get out of a small town where she didn't fit in. He did suggest, though, that she shouldn't rule out staying in-state – she might miss Neptune more than she expected. Alec's own homesickness had diminished over time, but he still found it hard to be so far away from Atlanta.

Alec really enjoyed talking to Mac, but he had to severely curtail his online time as he neared the end of his senior year. With finals approaching, he actually needed to study. After trying and failing to play WoW for only a couple of hours a day, he eventually went cold turkey. That whole 'WarCrack' joke didn't seem so funny anymore. It got so bad that he had to unplug his ethernet cable to get any work done...

* * *

After graduating, Alec got a job with a software company in Boston. The work was easy, and boring, but he had to put in ridiculously long hours and couldn't devote so much time to keeping up his online friendships. He and Mac drifted apart – she had her own real-life stuff going on, especially with her new boyfriend – and eventually lost touch.

Alec endured a year of legit IT work, at four different companies. But he didn't have a lot of respect for authority, especially when the person in charge was a _computer-illiterate fuckwit_. So he got fired, three times in a row. He finally decided that his talents were wasted in the corporate world, and quit the last job before he was pushed.

It turned out that Alec's hacking skills hadn't rusted at all during his failed attempt at respectability – weirdly, he was better than ever. And he'd earned enough to buy himself the best hardware and software on the market. Since he could access pretty much any computer system, and successfully cover his tracks afterwards, doing it for money seemed to be the next logical step.

There wasn't exactly a handbook for joining the criminal fraternity, so Alec started small. He moved to New York, hung out on certain hacker forums and in some dive bars, and developed useful connections. He wanted to avoid violence (especially the risk of violence to himself), so he took white-collar jobs: fraud, theft, and some staggeringly complex financial scams. He built up a reputation as a guy who could hack, drink soda, and crack jokes at the same time.

Alec's offshore bank account soon had a very impressive balance, and he quickly lost count of the number of laws he'd broken. As far as Nana knew, though, he had a highly-paid job at a Wall Street investment bank. He imagined her telling neighbors and church friends about her boy's success, and felt guilty for deceiving her, but it wasn't enough to make him stop. The money was too good, the thrill was too great, and Alec figured he was old enough to start following his own moral code. If he only stole from rich folks, and nobody got hurt, then where was the harm?

* * *

**2009**

When the Leverage crew set up its HQ in LA, a few years later, Alec tracked Mac down again. She was studying at Hearst College, near San Diego, and she invited him down for the weekend. She made it clear that she had a boyfriend, but that was cool – Alec had a big crush on his teammate Parker, even if she remained sadly oblivious.

It was so good to meet Mac in person at last, and she looked great. She told him that she'd gone through some heavy shit at the end of high school, with the suicide of her boyfriend and the revelation that he'd been a _mass-murdering psychopath_. The first year of college had been rough too. But she seemed happy now, with an active social life, excellent grades, and plans for graduate study.

Alec and Mac easily fell back into their old argumentative friendship. They debated the relative merits of recent superhero movies, with Alec claiming that some comics were sacrosanct and should never be adapted (film-makers always got them wrong). Mac accused him of being like the Comic Book Guy in _The Simpsons_, which he chose to take as a compliment; that man had standards, you know? Hell, Alec didn't rule out buying a comics store himself some day, just for the old-school geek cred...

They also revisited their long-standing points of disagreement. Mac still championed the Mac, of course, and Alec had to acknowledge her point that Apple products were the shiniest. He now split his allegiance: Linux was best for hacking, Windows was best for gaming, and the iPod was the best MP3 player. Alec had maintained his loyalty to orange soda, while Mac had switched up to Red Bull. They tried to rope in her friend Wallace as a taste-tester, but he held his hands up and claimed neutrality: "I'm like Switzerland, man – leave me out of this!"

Alec really liked Wallace, who balanced his jock side (he was a great ball player) with an impressive aptitude for mechanical engineering. The two of them took Wallace's latest project, a remote-controlled helicopter, down to the beach for field testing. They debated how to further refine the design all the way back to Mac's apartment.

After hearing so much about Veronica from Mac, Alec finally got to meet the plucky girl detective that evening. She was _tiny_, especially from Alec's 6'2 perspective, but she had a huge personality. In that regard she reminded him of Eliot – when he turned that fierce glare on you, you quickly forgot that he was only 5'8.

As they chatted, Alec learnt that Veronica's ambition was to join the FBI. She'd already done a summer internship, and planned to go to Quantico after she graduated. Alec was careful not to disclose the true nature of his work, instead referring to himself as the Chief IT Officer for a long-established LA consulting firm. She looked understandably underwhelmed, and the conversation moved on.

Alec didn't seriously think that Veronica would turn him in, given that she'd also done _many_ illegal things in order to help people. Still, he didn't want to take the chance. He'd been much more reckless when he was an independent operator, but now he had a team to worry about.

It was odd to feel so responsible for the safety of people who weren't family. He hadn't felt this way since he'd defended his youngest foster-sister against bullies, back in high school. Nate, Sophie, Eliot and Parker were grown adults, and far more capable of looking after themselves than little Jessie had been back then (though not so much anymore, now she'd taken up Alec's suggestion of kick-boxing classes).

But whether Alec was covering their tracks or covering their asses from the van – scanning police frequencies, disabling alarm systems, and all his other essential duties – protecting his teammates was his first priority. And he trusted them to have his back too. Alec was happy to see Mac similarly surrounded by good friends, who appreciated her talents and loved her for who she was.

* * *

On the drive back to LA the next day, Alec took a detour to visit The Giant Hole in the Ground Formerly Known as Sunnydale. He knew what had happened in 2003, of course; Willow had told him all about the final showdown with The First Evil. He'd been amazed to learn of the role that a certain magic amulet had played in the battle, shooting out light beams that incinerated all vampires in sight (and then caused the town to implode!). The stories about that long-lost amulet had been an important inspiration for Alec when he'd designed his vampire-killing light grenade back in 2001.

And Spike, who had been an unwilling guinea pig during the development of Alec's device, had voluntarily worn the amulet and sacrificed himself for Buffy's cause. It was _so weird_ how these things turned out, but Alec really shouldn't have been surprised by anything where vampires were concerned...

Alec stood at the edge and looked down at the crater. Although he knew the full story, and had watched the news footage, actually seeing it for himself was still a shock. He bowed his head, thinking of all the people (alive and dead) that the Hellmouth had swallowed. Willow's beloved Tara, buried in Sunnydale, was one of them. He wondered if Willow ever came back to mourn her here, at this giant chasm that was now a mass grave.

The last 100 yards of the road leading to the crater was lined with stalls selling souvenirs and snacks. A replica of the old brightly-colored 'Welcome to Sunnydale' sign, with the population figure now reduced to zero, stood just in front of the rim fence. Tourists queued to have their pictures taken next to it. Alec rolled his eyes. Even in the face of epic supernatural catastrophe, base human nature still prevailed. It was both deplorable and strangely comforting.

Alec got back in his car, and headed north to Los Angeles. He had a date with Parker – well, kind of. She was coming over for pizza, and they'd be watching _Ocean's 11_ together for at least the fourth time. Alec loved the movie's snarky dialogue, and the complex cons that required such precise timing and teamwork. But he hated that the tech guy was such an outdated stereotype ("Hey, some of us have _social skills_, OK? We ain't all stuttering, sweaty fools").

Parker loved the pickpocket, and the Chinese acrobat, but mostly she enjoyed mocking the methods used to reach the casino vault ("State-of-the-art equipment, my _ass_. There's more to a decent rappelling rig than shiny metal and pretty red lights...like, I don't know, checking that the cable is the right length? And then Danny forgot to check the batteries in the trigger – what a fucking amateur!"). Parker was hilarious – and hot – when she got her rant on. Alec often found himself watching her beautiful, expressive face rather than the movie.

Yeah, it was gonna be a great night with his perfect girl. Alec couldn't wait to get home.


	3. Chapter 3: Leverage & Doctor Who

**Chapter 3: Leverage & Doctor Who**

**Summary:** Mickey Smith claims that his girlfriend Rose left Earth with an alien in a blue box. Alec Hardison is...skeptical. And how the hell do you google a guy called "the Doctor", anyway?  
**Spoilers:** for seasons 1 and 2 of the new series of _Doctor Who_.  
**Author's notes:** for the purposes of this fic, please disregard the fact that Hardison is a canonical Whovian! In my AU, Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith are real people from London.

* * *

**Alec Hardison and Mickey Smith, 2005 – 2007**

Over the years, Alec had seen _all kinds_ of weird shit online. Some things made him scratch his head, while others made him yearn for brain bleach. It didn't help that he belonged to several message boards devoted to strange occurrences. Overactive imaginations, mental illness and heavy drug use might have accounted for many of the more extreme claims he came across.

But other phenomena were so widely reported that maybe there actually was something to them. Vampires and werewolves featured in folktales and urban legends all over the world, and Alec had learnt from his friend Willow that they were very real indeed.  
There was another phenomenon that kept popping up over and over: the Doctor. As a forum mod, Alec often deployed tactical snark when people asked stupid questions that were easily searchable. But he didn't blame the newbies who showed up enquiring about this mysterious figure they'd just seen / met / been rescued by. How the hell could you google a guy called "the Doctor", anyhow? Alec tried it himself, and got millions of hits.

The physical descriptions of the Doctor varied hugely. Sometimes he was tall, with wild brown curls and a ridiculously long scarf; sometimes he was an old man with white hair and a cane. His outfits ranged from a cool black leather jacket to an eye-wateringly multi-colored ensemble. Everyone agreed that he was a white dude with an English accent, but that was about it.

There was one other recurring detail: many of the witnesses mentioned seeing a big blue box, like an old-fashioned phone booth, which often appeared (or disappeared) when the Doctor was around. Combining "the Doctor" and "blue box" as search terms narrowed down the results, but there was still a lot of garbage to sift through.

Apart from the usual malware pages, which put up nonsense strings of words to lure naïve googlers, some unexpected sites showed up. For instance, it turned out that some moms wrote detailed blog posts about their kids' medical appointments...right down to the fact that _the doctor_ kept lollipops for child patients in a _blue box_ on his desk. Sigh.

Anyway, it was all a bit too clichéd for Alec to take it seriously. A guy changing his appearance? A phone booth, always conveniently nearby? Performing extraordinary feats and saving lives, without any weapons and without sticking around to claim a reward? Yeah, that sounded familiar. Alec might have been a massive comics fan, but he didn't actually believe that Superman was real.

* * *

So when he first came across Mickey Smith on one of his message boards, in mid-2005, Alec was ready to roll his eyes and scroll down to the next post. He was working long hours at his boring new programming job, and his online time was a lot more precious now than when he'd been at college.

But a couple of things made Alec stop and take notice. Mickey went further than most of the other Doctor-ites, stating that the white British guy was an alien and the blue box was both a spaceship and a time machine. Strangely, though, he didn't come across as some wild-eyed tinhat wearer; instead, he told his story plainly and clearly. Mickey also seemed to know his way around a computer (including how to use spell-check and the shift key), which often improved Alec's opinion of a person.

Most intriguingly, Mickey claimed that his girlfriend Rose had voluntarily gone off-planet with the Doctor. It was like Trillian leaving with Zaphod in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, Alec thought. Nobody had yet claimed that the Doctor had a non-standard number of heads, but it was probably just a matter of time...

The police naturally suspected Mickey of killing Rose, and had already interviewed him three times since her disappearance. So he had a vested interest in working out what the Doctor's deal was, and fast.

Mickey said that after he and Rose first met the Doctor, they'd found a website about him run by a fellow Londoner. Unfortunately that guy, Clive, had died soon afterwards in a bizarre shopping mall accident. Mickey had taken over his website, updating it as he gathered more information. He'd joined all the paranormal forums he could find, telling his story and appealing for help.

Over the next few months, Mickey put together a sizeable dossier on the Doctor. He tracked down some of the other folks that had reported meeting the guy, and recorded their stories. He also created a map of possible sightings of the blue box.

* * *

Mickey's tireless efforts made Alec curious, and he did some digging. He found that Rose Tyler had indeed vanished without trace, and that the police suspected Mickey but had no evidence. Alec also discovered that something very weird had been happening in London around the time she disappeared. Apparently it involved plastic objects coming to life, which made Clive's mannequin-induced death a little less inexplicable. Naturally the authorities had tried to dismiss the whole thing as a mass hallucination, but Alec managed to locate some security camera footage that clearly showed store dummies chasing and killing people.

Since Mickey's story checked out (at least to some extent), Alec decided to email him and offer to help. He showed Mickey how to move from simple googling to trawling the deep Web for information, and also taught him the basics of hacking. Alec thought of this as paying it forward, as Willow had originally set him on his own path towards hacker supremacy.

Together, Alec and Mickey accessed the networks of various governments around the world. They found nothing at the Pentagon, but struck _gold_ at the British Ministry of Defence. After breaking through multiple layers of security, Alec uncovered a whole file on the Doctor. There were old handwritten documents that had been scanned in, plus a database of more recent intel.

The recorded sightings of the Doctor went back a couple of centuries, at least, and there were some great stories. In 1863, a fierce argument between an elderly man in a purple velvet jacket and a green monster with tentacles was witnessed by a wounded Confederate soldier. The creature stomped out of the makeshift hospital; the old guy sat down at the bewildered patient's bedside and introduced himself as the Doctor. The two men talked for a while, before the Doctor walked into a big blue box which then vanished. The soldier told his nurse, who dutifully recorded the details, but naturally nobody believed him. Somehow, though, this Civil War medical file ended up in the British military archives.

Then there was the bizarre 1968 encounter in India between the Beatles, a middle-aged blond man in a cricketer's uniform, and a group of fish-headed creatures wearing water-filled glass helmets and carrying musical instruments. The band's incoherent account of the epic cross-species jam session that followed was explained away by their heavy drug use at the time. But clearly the UK authorities took it seriously enough to add to the Doctor's file.

Alec could see a few plausible explanations for these disparate sightings. Maybe the Doctor was a character played by a series of guys, who'd each inherited the title and the blue box from his predecessor (like in _The Princess Bride_). It could be a massive mindfuck, a practical joke played out over several generations, or a really weird psychology experiment.

Mickey's story about an alien with a time machine might explain the Doctor popping in and out of history, but didn't explain how he had so many faces. A shapeshifter, maybe? Alec wasn't prepared to rule it out. After all, he lived in a world where a petite blonde teenager was chosen by The Powers That Be to kill vampires, and where a gateway to Hell had swallowed an entire town...

* * *

The mystery solved itself, just a month later. The Doctor came back to London a year after he'd left, landing his big blue box in the middle of a housing project. Rose Tyler was with him, in perfect health and completely unaware of the pain she'd caused by disappearing. Mickey emailed Alec with the good news, saying he was greatly relieved to see Rose but still mad at her for all she'd put him through.

Alec's excitement at the Doctor's reappearance was rather overshadowed by what happened next: an alien ship crash-landed in London! He had to divide his time between watching CNN and modding his overheated forums. The tinhats were gleefully saying "I told you so" while the cultists were predicting the end of the world. Meanwhile, a flamewar broke out over whether "alien" or "extraterrestrial" was the more appropriate term.

Mickey got caught up in subsequent events, and didn't have time to email Alec until later. But it turned out that Alec's mentoring of him had kinda sorta helped to _save the world_. Evil aliens had taken over the British government, planning to start World War III, blow up the planet and sell the radioactive chunks to other aliens. Under incredible pressure, Mickey had managed to hack a submarine's controls and launch a missile at 10 Downing Street to kill them. The Doctor and Rose had also been inside the building, but thankfully they had survived.

When it was all over, the Doctor invited Mickey to travel the universe with him and Rose. But Mickey said no, and had to watch his girlfriend vanish into thin air again. Alec didn't really blame him for turning down the chance. He himself had enjoyed being Willow's friend and sometime technical assistant from a safe distance (about 2,000 miles), while she and her friends learnt the plural of "apocalypse" the hard way.

Alec knew all the ways you could kill a vampire, and had even devised a way to destroy every undead bloodsucker in sight, yet he'd never actually seen one. He always carried at least one wooden stake, just in case, but he didn't know whether he'd be able to _use_ it if he came face-to-fang with a vampire.

So if the Doctor showed up in his ship and asked Alec to come along, he wasn't entirely sure that he'd take up the offer. The idea of space tourism was insanely attractive in theory, but in reality it seemed highly dangerous – and unpredictable. Rose had meant to come back in 12 hours, but the time machine malfunctioned and brought her back after 12 months.

Alec did want to get a look inside that blue box, though, not least so he could understand the _science_ of it. Mickey had been on board the ship, which was apparently called the TARDIS, and reported that it was much bigger on the inside. That solved one problem: Alec had been wondering how an oversized wooden phone booth could be big enough to house three people, let alone strong enough to travel through time and space. But it raised a whole other set of questions...

* * *

Mickey's burning desire to investigate the Doctor understandably diminished after Rose left him again. Now that he was no longer a suspected killer, he could get on with his life. He stopped updating his website, but left it up in case other people encountered the Doctor and came online looking for answers. Alec helped out by manipulating the google results, ensuring that anyone searching for "the Doctor" or "blue box" got Mickey's site as the first hit.

The Doctor had asked Mickey to spread a virus that would wipe out all mention of him on the Internet. Maybe Mickey no longer hated the guy for ruining his life, but he wasn't sure he wanted to make the Doctor's life that much simpler. So he emailed Alec for advice, asking him to look at it.

Alec was stunned; it was the first time in years that he'd come across something so far beyond his own abilities. The virus actually could do what the Doctor described, which Alec would have said was _impossible_. Part of him wanted to set it free, just to watch what happened. But Alec was all about information being free, especially online. It was how he justified torrenting TV shows, true, but it was still a deeply-held philosophical belief. So he supported Mickey's eventual decision not to release the virus.

The Doctor and Rose came back to England a couple of times over the following months. At Christmas, during another alien invasion, Mickey found out how the Doctor came to have so many different faces: when he was about to die, he "regenerated". He kept his memories and abilities, but had new personality quirks and a new body.

Apparently this upgraded version of the Doctor was more handsome and a lot more charming than the last one, which didn't make Mickey feel any better about his girlfriend living with the guy. Alec, reading Mickey's email about being beamed aboard the aliens' ship, could be a little more objective about the whole thing. The Doctor's ability to renew his body, and delay his death, just blew Alec's mind.

* * *

A few months later, in one of his regular emails to Alec, Mickey mentioned some weird stuff happening at a London school. He was planning to contact the Doctor and Rose, and suggest that they come investigate it.

After that, though, Mickey disappeared. His workmates reported him missing, and the police checked out his flat: it looked like he'd just gone out for the day, with dishes piled in the sink and dirty washing in the hamper. He stopped answering Alec's emails, his bank balance wasn't touched, and months passed without any sign of him. When Alec hacked into the British police database, he was unsurprised to see that the cops had no leads at all.

"Vanished off the face of the Earth" was usually a figure of speech, but in Mickey's case it seemed literally true. Alec was pretty sure that he'd changed his mind, and gone off in the TARDIS. He missed Mickey, who'd become a good friend despite the fact that they'd never met offline, but wished him the best of luck.

Alec rarely chose to spend much time outside of big cities; he _hated_ small towns and rural areas. Internet access was often pathetic, decent pizza was hard to get, and some hicks weren't too pleased to see a black man in their midst.

One of the few upsides of being out in the sticks, though, was a great view of the stars. When Alec got stranded between two major metropolitan areas on a clear night, he'd go outside and gaze up at the night sky. Somewhere out there was a blue box containing a 900-year-old alien, a blonde named Rose, and Mickey. He hoped they were having the time of their lives.


	4. Chapter 4: Leverage & Heroes, pt 1

**Chapter 4: ****Leverage**** & Heroes, part 1**

**Summary:** Alec Hardison just can't work out how Nathan Petrelli won his 2006 Congress race. But he's got more important things on his mind right now, like getting the hell out of New York before the Feds catch up with him...  
**Warning:** swearing and non-graphic references to violence.  
**Spoilers:** for season 1 of _Heroes_, plus the pilot episode of _White Collar_.  
**Author's note:** I had to split this crossover in half, for the sake of the overarching plot's chronology. Part 2 serves as the epilogue to the story. So the main crossover character from _Heroes_ only appears indirectly here.

* * *

**Alec Hardison, 2006**

Alec didn't pay a huge amount of attention to politics these days. He was a registered Democrat, because his foster-mother Nana always had been, but held a pretty low opinion of all politicians. He figured that ordinary folks got screwed over, no matter who was in charge in Washington, and he hated the petty squabbling that seemed to prevent anything useful getting done.

Besides, he'd been hacking into federal computer networks since he was a teenager. The top-secret documents he'd read had destroyed any illusions he'd ever held about the law-making process.

But Alec was living in New York City during the 2006 midterms, so he couldn't miss Nathan Petrelli's all-out Congress run. The guy seemed decent enough on paper (for a Republican). He'd served his country as a Navy pilot, in several warzones. Then he'd worked as a prosecutor, rising through the ranks at the District Attorney's office.

However, a little digging revealed that a Mob-connected billionaire from Las Vegas was bankrolling Petrelli's campaign, which raised some very interesting questions. Alec didn't care too much, though; all the polls suggested that the Democratic incumbent would win comfortably.

So when the November 7th election turned out to be a landslide for Petrelli, on an unprecedented scale, Alec sat up and took notice. There was something _distinctly hinky_ about that result. He didn't trust those electronic voting machines – not when he knew how easy it would be to tamper with them.

The more he investigated, in the hours following the announcement, the weirder Petrelli's win looked. Alec hacked into the state Electoral Commission (a worryingly simple process) and examined the voting patterns. It was suspicious that entire polling stations had voted for Petrelli, even in solidly blue areas of the traditionally blue Congressional district.

It also seemed strange that ballots cast during the morning and early afternoon favored the Democrat, roughly in proportion with pre-election polls. The turning point was oddly specific: after 3:25pm, the voting suddenly tipped _massively_ in favor of the Republican. In the end, Petrelli won 64% of the vote.

Despite all his efforts, though, Alec came up with precisely squat. He couldn't prove that someone had messed with the individual machines or the district's computer network. There were absolutely no traces of fraud, no evidence that the machines had been pre-programmed by the manufacturer, and no signs of hacking on the day.

Honestly? It looked like someone had just waved a magic wand at 3:25 that afternoon, and ordered the system to only register votes for Petrelli from then on. Most people would probably dismiss that explanation as _ridiculous_. But Alec knew someone who'd been inside a time-traveling spaceship, had met a vampire slayer with super-strength, and counted a seriously powerful witch as one of his oldest friends. So his parameters for what was possible were broader than most people's...

In particular, Alec wondered if a techno-pagan could have interfered with the voting machines. He put out some feelers on the paranormal forums he belonged to, but everyone else seemed mystified too. Nobody had bragged about rigging the result, and it was the kind of achievement that most hackers (magical or not) would crow about from the rooftops.

* * *

Unfortunately, Alec quickly had to put the whole Petrelli thing aside. The day after the election, something a lot more important came up.

His most recent job had involved creating fake identities for a bunch of thieves, and then facilitating their infiltration of a major investment bank. It was a two-pronged attack, targeting the bank's Wall Street headquarters and its Los Angeles office. But the key inside man at HQ had just blown his own cover, _spectacularly_, and Alec felt a sudden need to get the hell out of town.

The whole screw-up reminded Alec why he preferred to work alone: other criminals often turned out to be really fucking stupid! Seriously...if you spent weeks planning an inside job to defraud a top company of millions, wouldn't you choose to insert a conman who could at least _fake_ a decent level of financial expertise when put on the spot?

Not this gang of idiots, though. Instead, the firm's recently-hired quantitative analyst had crashed and burned during a big presentation to the board. When his boss got suspicious, the fake analyst had panicked. He'd negotiated a deal with the DA, and then confessed to everything. Now the FBI was after his accomplices, both in NYC and LA.

Alec had been using one of his carefully-constructed throwaway aliases, as he always did when working with a new crew. The other guys couldn't give him up because they didn't know his real name, and he'd thoroughly destroyed all electronic evidence of his involvement.

Still, running seemed like the safest bet. Alec had heard stories about Peter Burke, head of the FBI's White Collar unit for New York, and had _no_ desire to make the agent's acquaintance in person. Burke had even managed to catch Neal Caffrey, widely considered to be one of the best conmen and forgers around, after Caffrey had eluded the authorities for many years.

Burke had a similar rep to Nathan Ford, one of the people IYS sent out to investigate insurance claims: tenacious, brilliant, and incorruptible. Ford had chased Alec a few times when he'd been freelancing for art thieves, and even caught him after one museum job. That was the lowest point in Alec's career, for sure.

Luckily, Ford had let him go after receiving an anonymous tip-off about the location of the crew's boss, Steve Mathers, and the stolen Rembrandt. If Alec had sent Ford that SMS from a burner phone concealed in the lining of his jacket, well, he was pretty sure nobody could ever prove it.

Alec didn't feel too bad about having ratted out Mathers to save his own ass. The psychotic fucker had totally deserved to go down for what he'd done to that poor security guard at the museum. Alec had deliberately gone into white-collar cybercrime to _avoid_ violence like that...

Nathan Ford cared about retrieving stolen items for his insurance company; he wasn't so concerned with pressing charges. Alec would rather not be chased by a Fed who was just as good as Ford, but with the law on his side and the FBI's resources at his back.

* * *

So as soon as he finished packing up his Manhattan apartment, Alec would be catching the next flight to Atlanta. He'd been planning on heading home the following week anyway, for Nana's 60th birthday. She'd been in hospital recently, after a minor heart attack, and Alec wanted to cheer her up.

He and his foster-sister Sheena had organized an awesome party (Nana knew about it, of course; Alec didn't think that surprising an old lady with a bad heart was a good idea). They'd booked out Nana's favorite restaurant for the entire evening. It was an old-fashioned soul food place, run by some of her church friends, and they made the best sweet potato pie Alec had ever tasted.

He'd contacted all his foster-siblings, and tracked down others that Nana had welcomed into her home before Alec's time. God bless the Georgia care system's stupidly-easy-to-hack database, even if it was sadly short on clues as to Alec's birth parents...

Around 20 of Nana's former foster-kids would be coming back to Atlanta for her birthday. It was going to be a pretty big crowd: most of them had partners, and half a dozen had children of their own. It was hard to believe that Sheena had a baby girl now, or that Tommy and his wife had adopted twin boys.

Alec didn't think they'd ever gathered all together to thank Nana for her loving care. She was in poor health now, worn out by a lifetime of hard work, and he didn't know how much time she had left. It was vital that they hold this reunion sooner rather than later.

So Alec had gone all out to ensure that everyone could make it back to Atlanta to see Nana: he'd bought plane tickets, hired rental cars, and booked hotel rooms. He could easily spare the money, and he was happy to use it for such a good cause. The way Alec saw it, what was the point of having a highly profitable talent if he didn't use the proceeds to help out his family?

* * *

Alec took one last look around, making sure he'd packed everything and had left no evidence that could identify him. He'd already called a local company which specialized in providing a discreet and thorough cleaning service to the criminal fraternity. By the end of the day, there would be no stray hairs or fingerprints left anywhere in the apartment, hallway, elevator, or building lobby.

As he walked down to the corner to hail a cab to LaGuardia, Alec passed a news stand. Nathan Petrelli's smirking face appeared on the front pages of the _Post_ and the _Times_, with the headlines proclaiming his remarkable win. Alec rolled his eyes. He wished he had time to investigate that supposed landslide more closely; he had a feeling that there was a really interesting story behind it.

But right now, he had a plane to catch.


	5. Chapter 5: Leverage & Supernatural, pt 1

**Chapter 5: Leverage & Supernatural, part 1**

**Summary:** Alec's been having strange dreams for months; now a shadowy figure is stalking him. And when he starts investigating his own family history, things get even worse.  
**Warnings:** swearing, angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death.  
**Spoilers:** for seasons 1 and 2 of _Supernatural_, and all of _Buffy_.

* * *

**Alec Hardison and Ash, 2006 – 2007**

Alec had been having the weirdest dreams recently. They'd started in early spring, and were getting more frequent and vivid as the year wore on. His unconscious mind came up with some seriously nasty shit. What was with the staring yellow eyes, and the voice that kept droning on about demon armies and the cataclysmic battle to come?

Clearly he'd watched the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy too many times. Gollum's glowing eyes in the mines of Moria were kinda freaky, and that crazy little dude sure did talk to himself a whole lot. And it didn't take a psych degree to interpret Sauron as Satan and the orcs as his demonic army.

Even if they were Tolkien-inspired, the nightmares still scared the hell out of Alec. He often stayed up really late, putting off going to bed until he'd be too tired to dream, but it didn't seem to help. Soon he was also getting terrible headaches, which he figured was due to sleep deprivation.

Some of Alec's anxiety obviously stemmed from worry about his foster-mother's health. Nana had suffered two heart attacks since October, and the outlook wasn't good. He was paying for her treatment at the best hospital in Atlanta, and flew down to see her whenever he could.

On his visit at Christmas, she noticed the dark shadows under his eyes and asked what was troubling him. Typical Nana: even when she was so sick, she was still thinking of others. Without quite meaning to, Alec found himself telling her all about the dreams. When he described the yellow eyes and menacing voice, she gasped and started trembling.

Cursing himself for upsetting her, Alec apologized and got up to call the nurse. But Nana grabbed his hand in a surprisingly strong grip, telling him not to worry. Then she asked him to call her friend Louise, and get her to stop by the hospital later. Together, she said, the two of them would pray for Alec. He was touched by the offer, for sure, but he didn't really see how prayer could help.

* * *

Nana died in February, slipping away quietly in her sleep. Even though he'd had time to prepare himself, it hit Alec hard. Her funeral was a huge affair: the church was overflowing with Nana's relatives, her former foster-kids and their own families, and her many friends. It was a fitting send-off for a woman who'd given so much of herself to the neighborhood, the church, and to society's unwanted children.

After the funeral, Alec returned to Chicago, where he'd been living since running from the Feds in New York. The winter weather was as bleak as his mood. He'd loved Nana more than anyone else in his life; he felt lost without her.

And things were getting worse, not better. His nightmares were more frightening than ever, and being awake wasn't much of a respite. Whenever he left his apartment, Alec had this growing sense that he was being watched – like there was a dark presence, lurking just out of sight.

He didn't think he was just being paranoid. Although most crazy folks would say that, Alec could _prove_ it. He'd tapped into the video feeds for the security camera outside his building's entrance, and the one outside the liquor store on the corner.

And when he accessed the footage from those nights when he'd felt he was being followed home? Sure enough, a shadowy shape could be seen tailing him down the street. But whenever Alec-on-the-screen turned around, the person melted away into the darkness.

Or maybe it was a person-shaped _thing_ – Alec wasn't ruling anything out. He'd mentally run through all the supernatural creatures he'd learnt about over the years, but come up empty-handed. When he emailed his friend Willow for help, she replied saying that vampires occasionally stalked their victims for a while before attacking. It was atypical behavior, though, and usually indicated a personal connection with the target.

To his knowledge, Alec had never met a vampire. So why would one be stalking him? He'd invented that vampire-killing grenade for Buffy, sure, but that had been 6 years ago. Vampires might well believe in revenge being served cold, given that they could live for centuries...so maybe they'd been lulling him into a false sense of security. Or, more likely, some badass vampire only just found out that Alec had (indirectly) been responsible for killing many of his friends.

This might have been a reasonable explanation, but it was _not_ a comforting one.

Unfortunately Willow couldn't come to Chicago to help him; she was going to be traveling around South America with Buffy for a few more months, training the local Slayers. So Alec decided to take matters into his own hands. He'd kept some prototypes of the vampire-killing device, so he made sure to carry one at all times.

Coming home from the grocery store two nights later, he felt that familiar unnerving presence. When he stopped and looked behind him, there was of course nobody there. Alec turned around again and kept strolling along casually, but that prickling feeling of being watched remained. As he walked, he pulled the grenade out of his jacket pocket and primed it. Then he tossed it over his right shoulder.

Alec instinctively shielded his eyes from the burst of bright light, then spun around hoping to see a telltale pile of dust on the sidewalk. But there was nothing and nobody there – just the dark deserted street. He heard a sinister laugh from the shadows, and a deep voice said, "Nice try, son, but I'll be back for you soon!" Then silence.

* * *

Alec pretty much avoided going outside for the next couple of months. His excuse was the harsh winter: he was still a Southern boy at heart, and he wasn't any fonder of Chicago's bitterly cold wind at age 23 than he had been at age 14.

But honestly, he was just too afraid to leave his apartment. If he'd pissed off his stalker by trying to kill him/it/whatever, then he'd rather not risk another encounter out in the open. And if there really was a vampire after him, it couldn't cross his threshold without an invitation.

Despite the sleep deprivation, nightmares, worsening headaches, and feeling under siege, Alec was weirdly able to work better than ever. Maybe it was all the extra caffeine he was consuming to stay awake, but he was getting a surprising amount done surprisingly fast these days. His already solid reputation had improved out of sight, and he was now one of the go-to guys for cyber-crime.

It actually wasn't too hard to achieve a hermit-like existence. Alec's building was well-heated, and his apartment was spacious and comfortable. He'd only just moved to Chicago a few months earlier, so he didn't have an offline social life to keep up. He could do most of his work from home, he had his groceries delivered, and he had all the local takeout places on speed dial. And between his fantastic home theater set-up and his super-fast broadband connection, Alec wouldn't be getting bored anytime soon.

Late one night in April, killing time online to avoid going to sleep, Alec got chatting with an interesting guy who'd joined one of his paranormal forums a while back. Like Alec, Ash had studied computer science at MIT. They hadn't crossed paths, though, because Ash had been kicked out for fighting the year before Alec started. The guy seemed oddly proud of being expelled; he even went by the handle 'DrBadass,' which Alec thought was hilarious.

Now Ash lived and worked at some roadside bar in the middle of nowhere. He seemed like a weird mix of backwoods hick and technical genius. He and Alec bonded over programming, hacking, gaming (they both had an abiding love of old-school games), and a belief in phenomena that went bump in the night.

Ash's focus was researching and tracking ghosts and other supernatural creatures. He didn't say much about his offline activities, but Alec got the clear impression that it wasn't a purely academic interest – Ash either fought such things or helped people that did. Alec briefly pondered this puzzle: Willow was to Buffy as Ash was to _x_? But he didn't ask, and Ash didn't tell.

* * *

For some reason, Ash seemed especially concerned with tracing a bunch of kids born around 1983; most of them had lost their mothers in house fires when they were infants. He and Alec discussed possible search algorithms, using both publicly-available data and confidential sources.

But Alec couldn't just treat this as an interesting research exercise, like he had with Mickey's quest for information about the Doctor. Although he hadn't told Ash yet, Alec wondered if he might fit the bill himself. He was born in 1983, and knew that his mother had died when he was very young (he wasn't sure exactly when or how). Alec had been placed in state care as a baby, and had gone through a number of foster homes before winding up with Nana in Atlanta.

Unfortunately the papers relating to his birth parents had been lost somewhere in the care system, and the records hadn't been computerized. So he'd never been able to find out anything else about his past. Alec didn't know his father's name, or if the man was alive or dead; he didn't even know if he had brothers and sisters out there somewhere.

As a little kid, he'd made up all kinds of things about his folks. His dad was a Navy SEAL, or an NBA star; his mom was a supermodel, or a soccer mom who made the world's best pecan pie. These daydreams had consoled him in some of the more horrible places he'd lived. Moving to Nana's had put a lot of his issues to rest, though. She'd given him a loving home, a sense of belonging, and enough foster-siblings that he'd never felt lonely.

In his early teens, Alec had tried investigating his background – and found squat. Eventually, he'd lost hope and lost interest. But he'd always kept his birth name, even though 'Alec' was such a dumb name (he consoled himself with the thought that Sir Alec Guinness was pretty awesome in _Star Wars_) and 'Hardison' hadn't done him any favors at school. If anyone was out there looking for him, Alec wanted to be easy to find...

Talking to Ash about this cohort of motherless kids had stirred up all that long-dormant curiosity. The last time Alec had tried looking for his relatives, he'd been much younger and far less skilled. He'd tried only the standard (legal) methods of searching available to him in Atlanta. Now he had access to Social Security records, Census data, electoral rolls and a whole lot of other sources – not to mention the handy fact that many newspapers now had online archives.

Alec grabbed a bag of gummy frogs, opened another bottle of soda, and went to work.

* * *

An hour later, Alec finally had some solid answers about his family. He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to process what he'd just learnt.

The bad news was that his mother, Tina, had died in a fire when Alec was a baby (as it happened, she died on the day he reached 6 months). She'd only been 30 years old when she'd suffered that awful fate.

The authorities hadn't been able to conclusively determine what had caused the blaze at her small New Orleans apartment; they'd assumed that it was an electrical fault. The man who lived in the next apartment had won a bravery award for running into the burning nursery. Seeing that Tina was beyond help, he'd picked up her baby sons and carried them to safety.

And that was the really astonishing news – Alec had a twin brother! The proof was right there in the _Times-Picayune_ births column: two boys, Alec and Mark, born on May 13th 1983 to Miss Tina Hardison at New Orleans Charity Hospital.

Alec wondered if Tina had named her babies after _Star Wars_ stars (in which case, he should be grateful that one of them hadn't been called Harrison Hardison). It was nice to think that she might have been a geek, borrowing the names of two actors who portrayed Jedi. It made him feel closer to the mother he'd never known.

Tina had apparently been a single mom. There was no mention of a husband or boyfriend in the newspaper articles about the fire; her sons' father wasn't listed in the birth announcement or named on Alec's birth certificate either. So that was pretty much a dead end, unless Alec went down to Louisiana and tried to track down people who'd known his mom 25 years ago.

As Hardison was Tina's maiden name, Alec was easily able to locate her records – it turned out that she was originally from Texas. His maternal grandparents had lived in Houston, but they'd both passed away a few years after his mother's death. Tina had had two siblings; her younger sister had died in a car crash as a teenager, and her older brother had been killed while serving in Vietnam. It seemed that the Hardisons were plagued by tragedy...

Alec was disappointed to discover that he had no close relatives left on his mother's side. But it did answer a question that had long bothered him: why hadn't his extended family adopted him after his mother's death? It looked like Tina's folks had been too elderly and unwell to take care of one baby, let alone twins, and there was nobody else left.

So Alec and Mark had gone into the care system, and had been sent to different foster homes. Clearly they had been separated so early in their lives that they didn't even remember each other.

Alec couldn't find any further official record of a Mark Hardison; there was no indication of what had happened to him. If he was still alive, his name must have been changed by the family who took him in.

So Alec set out to find his brother using the only parameters he had: an African-American male, born the same day as Alec. If it turned out that Mark's adoptive parents had also changed his birthday, then he was screwed. But it was worth a shot.

After half an hour, in which Alec had worked on improving his best time for expert-level Minesweeper (he liked to return to the classics when he was tense), the search program had finished. Trawling through multiple federal, state and commercial databases, it had found several dozen possible matches.

Scrolling through the search results, Alec finally struck gold. Jake Talley was born in New Orleans on May 13th 1983, and adopted as a one-year-old by a family in Alabama. His adoptive father had passed away, but his adoptive mother and younger sister still lived down in Birmingham.

The DMV database provided definitive proof that Jake Talley was Alec's brother Mark. Looking at the photo on the screen gave Alec another shock: they weren't just twins, they were _identical_. It was the freakiest thing – not quite like looking into a mirror, but close enough. Jake had a mustache, shorter hair, and bigger muscles. He looked like a total badass, compared to Alec.

The DMV had Jake's address listed as an Army base in Texas. Five minutes later, Alec discovered that hacking the Pentagon was still worryingly easy, seven years after he'd first done it as a high school student. Seriously? With the rise of cyber-terrorism, and foreign governments seeking access to US secrets, computer security should have been more important than ever. And yet it seemed that the only requirement for heading the Department of Defense's IT team was the ability to type with more than two fingers...

* * *

Accessing the Army's personnel database, Alec soon found his twin's file. Jake had enlisted right out of high school, and had already survived a tour to Iraq. For the last 15 months, he'd been serving in Afghanistan; right now, he was in southern Kandahar. A little research told Alec that Kandahar province was the most dangerous area of one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. He hated to think of his brother being out there.

Jake's disciplinary record made for interesting reading. It seemed that there had been a change in his behavior in the last year or so. Previously, he'd occasionally been involved in brawls – while he didn't usually start them, he was pretty skilled at ending them. So his conduct hadn't been blemish-free, but he was otherwise considered a good soldier.

More recently, Jake had started fighting his comrades a lot more often, and winning by a _huge_ margin. He'd knocked one soldier clear across the room, breaking his arm and shattering his collarbone. He'd punched someone else so hard that the man's jaw had needed wiring.

On the flip side, though, Alec's brother had been awarded a bravery medal! Six months ago, when a truck overturned while his unit was on patrol, he'd saved the driver by single-handedly lifting the vehicle off of him.

His C.O.'s mission reports also indicated that Jake was suddenly performing his everyday duties far better than before. He could run further and faster, and was shooting more accurately. And when a couple of encounters with insurgents had come down to hand-to-hand combat, he'd killed his opponents within seconds and without breaking a sweat.

While these extraordinary feats seemed to have tempered his commanders' attitude towards Jake, they were still concerned by his outbursts of excessive violence. As well as imposing punishment duties for the fights, the brass had referred him for anger management counseling. But according to the Army psychiatrist's notes, Jake had been evasive about what was going on; he said only that he felt angry all the time and was having creepy dreams.

Jake's medical record was also very interesting. He'd seemed to be in excellent health until last year, when he'd started complaining of awful migraines. He had seen the base medic several times, and had even undergone a brain scan at the Bagram AFB hospital, but nothing unusual had been found. He'd been given heavy duty painkillers, and sent back to his unit.

Alec saw two possibilities here. Option A: his twin was faking the headaches to get sent home, and the Hulk-strength thing with the truck was just a fluke adrenaline surge. Option B, which unfortunately seemed more likely: something _really weird_ was going on.

Now that Alec thought about it, his own headaches and dreams had started about the same time as Jake's. Could they be connected, with some strange psychic twin-fu, or was it a coincidence? After all, Alec was pretty sure he'd have noticed if he developed any superpowers.

Wanting to make contact with Jake immediately, Alec carefully composed a short message. He figured that the Army kept tabs on emails received by servicemen, so he wasn't going to detail the highly illegal methods he'd used to find his twin. He also didn't know if Jake was aware he was adopted.

So Alec just introduced himself, saying that his family history research had pointed him towards Jake being his long-lost brother. He attached a photo of himself, figuring that would get the guy's attention for sure.

The Army files showed that Jake's unit was out on a long-range mission in the mountains right now; he wasn't due back at base, where the soldiers had regular internet access, until mid-May. Alec could wait until then. But he placed a tag on Jake's record, which would alert him if anything changed. He couldn't shake this weird feeling of foreboding...

* * *

A few days later, Alec was sitting at his computer watching an old _Star Trek_ episode. It was late afternoon, and he was vaguely thinking about ordering Chinese soon. Suddenly, his screen began to flicker; the show's audio went all staticky, like a detuned radio. Then the lights went out.

Within seconds, he was hit by the worst headache of his entire life – a terrible searing pressure, like his skull was going to split open. Blood began to gush from his nose. He felt like all the strength had been sapped from his body; he slid off his chair and onto the floor, clutching his forehead in agony.

A vision swam in front of his closed eyes: a man with yellow eyes, grinning wickedly and beckoning to him. The next moment, Alec had the strangest sensation all down his left side, as if a powerful force was pulling at him. He screamed as a second force started wrenching his body in the _opposite_ direction. He feared that he was about to be ripped in half!

But just as Alec was praying for a quick death, the pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

He lay sprawled on the floor, dizzy and gasping and trembling. Sitting up gingerly, Alec took stock of his situation. He was alone in the apartment, which was silent apart from the sounds coming from his computer. The room was dimly-lit because all the bulbs had blown. His face and chest were covered in blood, and he felt cold and clammy and nauseous.

Alec wondered if he should maybe call 911, or drive himself to the hospital. But whatever had happened seemed to be over, and how could he possibly explain it without sounding crazy? Really, he just wanted to sleep for days...

He slowly got to his feet, his head spinning, and stumbled to the bathroom. After washing his face, he glanced at the mirror and then did a double-take: he looked like something out of a horror movie, with bloodshot eyes, a greenish tinge to his skin, and a shirt splashed with red. He stripped off his clothes, staggered to bed, and passed out.

When Alec woke up again, the sun was rising – he'd slept for over 12 hours. He felt a lot better: he still had a headache, but it was a fraction of its previous strength. Afraid he'd fall over if he tried to shower, he ran a hot bath and sank into it with a grateful sigh.

Lifting his arms up to soap them, he noticed something very strange. There were five reddish blisters on his left forearm, like he'd been branded by the touch of someone's hand. The skin was burningly hot when he pressed his own fingertips to it, and sore. And on his right wrist there was a smaller set of five pinkish-white marks, like a person had dug their fingers into his arm and still hadn't let go. When he touched those spots, the skin was completely numb.

...well, fuck. That ruled out a brain hemorrhage, a seizure, or any other medical event Alec could think of. There had been nobody present in the room to leave those marks on his arms, and he hadn't done it to himself. He could only come up with one explanation, as bizarre as it sounded: two opposing supernatural forces had fought a tug-of-war over him.

_Why_, though? Alec knew people who battled the forces of darkness, but he'd never been on the frontlines himself. He was hardly a serious threat to anyone or anything evil. So who had been trying to drag him away? Maybe that yellow-eyed man he'd seen was also his shadowy stalker. And who had been protecting Alec from harm: did he have a guardian angel or something?

Dried and dressed, Alec fixed himself some breakfast then sat back down at his computer to seek some answers. He tried searching for other accounts of people being torn apart by invisible beings, but just found graphic tales of medieval punishments inflicted in the name of God. Nauseated, he pushed his bowl of cereal away.

Alec was in the middle of writing an email to Willow about his ordeal when an alert popped up – his brother's Army file had just been updated by a field commander in Afghanistan.

Jake had been reported missing.

Witnesses from his squad said he'd fallen asleep in their shared tent at about midnight. Due to head out at dawn, they'd all worn their uniforms and boots to bed. But by 4am, when one of them got up to visit the latrine, Jake had vanished.

Jake's squad had turned the camp upside down looking for him, but there was no trace. He hadn't taken his gun, body armor or helmet with him, and no soldier in his right mind would wander off-base in hostile territory without those essentials. It was a freezing, moonless night, but he'd also left behind his cold weather gear, his flashlight and his night vision goggles.

So it looked like Jake had gone crazy, and gone AWOL. The sentries hadn't seen him leave the camp, but the Army was assuming that he'd somehow slipped past them. But being so poorly equipped, in a remote and barren environment, he couldn't have gotten far in just a few hours. As the search teams hadn't found him (or his body) anywhere nearby, they were afraid that he might have been captured by the Taliban or other unfriendly locals.

Alec checked the time difference between Afghanistan and Illinois, on a hunch, and yes: late afternoon in Chicago was the middle of the night in Kandahar. It seemed highly likely that his brother had disappeared at about the same time that Alec had been attacked yesterday. Surely the timing _couldn't_ be a coincidence...so had Jake been taken by the thing that had tried to grab Alec?

* * *

Two days passed with no further news of Jake. Alec, reading the Army's increasingly worried internal communications from the comfort of his Chicago apartment, barely slept. It was agonizing to think that he could have found his brother, only to lose him again almost immediately.

Meanwhile, there had been no more strange occurrences at Alec's end. When he ventured out for some much-needed fresh air, he hadn't sensed any watching presence. And he'd stopped dreaming of yellow eyes and prophetic voices, but what had replaced them was even worse. When he did manage to fall asleep, he had nightmares about terrible things happening to Jake mixed with vivid images of his mother's fiery death.

Alec needed to distract himself, and be with people who cared about him. He was between contracts anyway, so he packed his laptop and some clothes and caught the next flight down to Atlanta.

He had bought Nana's rented house for her two years earlier. It had been the first major purchase of his criminal career, funded by a big Wall Street job (Nana had assumed Alec was working at the financial firm, rather than defrauding it from the comfort of his couch, and he hadn't corrected her). His foster-sisters Sheena and Jessie now lived in the house, rent-free, and they were very happy to have him stay for a while.

When he'd come home for Nana's funeral, Sheena's daughter Becca had still been crawling; now, she'd started walking. Seeing the little girl toddle towards him made Alec laugh for the first time in days. He picked his niece up and hugged her close, feeling some of his tension drain away.

Alec caught up with the family news over a pitcher of iced tea made to Nana's old recipe (that was another thing he'd missed, living up north). Jessie was in her freshman year at a local college, studying to become an elementary school teacher. Sheena was a stay-at-home mom during the day; in the evenings, Jessie babysat Becca while Sheena worked at the neighborhood youth center. The staff there had really helped her when she'd been a messed-up teenager, Sheena said, so she wanted to pay it forward. Longer term, she was thinking of becoming a foster-mother herself.

Alec relaxed a little, sitting around the table with his sisters as Becca played happily on the floor. Their lives were wonderfully _normal_, after all the weirdness that Alec had experienced lately. The scene was so familiar and homey...he half-expected Nana to walk out of the kitchen, bringing them a plate of her chocolate-chip cookies and scolding Alec to "go cut the grass, already!" But she wouldn't, of course; she was gone.

Abruptly, he decided to go visit Nana's grave. He really had to tell someone about Jake, but he couldn't possibly unload it all on his sisters. And confiding in Nana had always made him feel better.

So he drove his rental car out to the cemetery, and walked across the beautifully manicured lawns to Nana's final resting place. It was a gorgeous early summer's afternoon; he could feel the sun's heat soaking into his bones, after all the weeks he'd spent cooped up in his Chicago apartment.

Alec had paid for the elegant black marble headstone, but he hadn't seen it until now. The epitaph read _'Ruth Jane Maxwell, 1946-2007. A sister in Christ and a mother to us all'_. While it was a very fitting tribute, seeing Nana's name carved in stone made her loss unbearably final.

Overcome by grief, exhaustion and fear, Alec collapsed onto the stone bench at the foot of her grave. His head in his hands, he began to cry for Nana, for his mother, for Jake...and for himself, left behind.

* * *

Alec didn't know how much time had passed, but at least he'd run out of tears. He was just staring at the ground, trying to collect himself so he could start telling Nana his story, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

Louise, Nana's closest friend, was walking across the lawn towards him. Although he was frustrated by the interruption, Nana had raised him to be polite to his elders. So he stood up, kissed Louise's wrinkled cheek, and gestured for her to sit beside him.

Alec had known her for most of his life; she'd been a frequent visitor to Nana's house, and an honorary aunt to all the kids. Louise was getting old, her black hair long ago gone gray, but her brisk energy was undiminished.

Like Nana, Louise seemed to have some kind of mind-reading ability. She took one look at his face and said, "Alec, you look like death warmed over! Tell me – are you still dreaming about that yellow-eyed man?"

He blinked at her, puzzled, and Louise nodded.

"Ruth told me all about your nightmares before she died. She asked me to protect you."

Alec vaguely recalled that Nana and Louise had been planning to pray for the cessation of his dreams, last Christmas. "But how could you protect me from something that's inside my head?"

"Honey, I have to tell you something you'll find hard to believe," Louise replied. "The man with the yellow eyes is a demon, sent by Satan. He chose you for some reason, when you were a little baby, and that's why your momma died. There's been a shadow hanging over you ever since."

His mind reeling, Alec asked, "How do you know all this?"

"I'm part of a network of devout Christians, all across America, who believe that the Devil is plotting to bring on the Apocalypse. Ruth belonged too, of course. Our group became aware, last year, that a group of kids around your age were getting visitations from the yellow-eyed demon. He granted them unusual abilities, and he's been tempting them to do terrible things to gain even more power..."

If that was true, then a whole bunch of things suddenly made a _lot_ more sense: Ash's determination to find the children born in 1983, Alec's nightmares and mysterious stalker, and Jake's super-strength.

"OK, so, a demon has been visiting me in my sleep," Alec said, "and the big battle he's been telling me about is the Apocalypse. I can accept that. But I don't have any special abilities!"

Louise raised her eyebrows. "Alec, you always were freakishly good with technology. But have you noticed recently that you've become even better than before?"

...oh, God. Now that Alec thought about it, the last time he could remember making a serious mistake was over a year ago; since then, he'd been _bulletproof_. Tasks that had once seemed impossible were now child's play. He'd been able to find massive security holes in every computer network he'd targeted, even the ones generally considered impenetrable.

These days he only had to think a command, or plot a route around a firewall, and it seemed to happen astoundingly fast. It was like his computer had become an extension of his brain.

Alec had figured, arrogantly, that it was just the natural honing of his already awesome skills. It was really disturbing to think that the improvement was demon-powered rather than caffeine-fueled.

Louise must have seen the dismay on his face, because she reached over and patted his hand.

"It's not your fault, child. Being targeted by a demon doesn't make a person _wicked_. You can still choose whether or not to give in to the temptation, and you've managed to resist. Ruth knew that you were different, and she loved you no matter what."

Somehow that was even harder to hear than all the rest of it. Missing Nana more than ever, Alec had to close his eyes for a moment.

"She had an ability of her own, you know," Louise continued casually, and Alec jerked his head around to gape at her. "A kind of empathy, I guess you could call it – she could sense people's emotions, and it was especially strong with you kids."

"I always thought she was psychic," Alec said weakly; it actually did explain a lot.

Then he took a deep breath, and told Louise everything that he'd been planning to tell Nana. He started with the worsening nightmares and the stalking, then moved on to discovering the existence of his twin brother. Louise was surprised to hear about Jake, which made Alec feel relieved – he would've hated to learn that Nana had kept that secret from him too.

When he described that terrifying feeling of being pulled apart by invisible forces, though, Louise's reaction was unexpected: she clapped her hands together and _smiled_.

"Thank God it worked! I'm sorry it was so painful, honey, but believe me...if the demon had taken you, it would have been far worse."

Alec was stunned. "Huh? What worked?"

"I'm a good Christian woman, but I also have another talent that I use from time to time – you might call it magic." Alec, whose friend Willow was a witch, had no problem with this concept. He nodded encouragingly, and Louise continued.

"When you told Ruth about the yellow-eyed man appearing in your dreams, she just _knew_ the demon would try to take you away sooner or later. So she asked me to shield you. I cast a protective spell to anchor your body to the Earth, and prevent the demon carrying you off. It was real hard to hold onto you, though, because he's terribly powerful."

Alec showed her the blisters on his left arm, then rolled up his other sleeve to reveal the five pale patches. "So that was the demon, and this was you?"

Louise laid her fingertips over the numb spots on his right wrist; they fit perfectly. "Yes, that's right. But your Nana helped to give me the strength – she's watching over you from Heaven, Alec."

Alec glanced up at the clear blue sky; he wanted to believe it, so badly. It seemed easy to accept that aliens and vampires were real, without having seen them for himself, but this felt very different somehow.

He was reluctant to ask, but he had to know one last thing. "So what do you think happened to Jake?"

Louise sighed. "I'm sorry to say that a bunch of the other special kids my group's been monitoring have disappeared over recent months, same as Jake. They just vanished without trace, and haven't been seen since. We don't know for sure what the demon wants with them, but it can't be anything good. You might have to prepare yourself for bad news, honey."

* * *

Alec needed time and space to take in all this new information. He thanked Louise for her protection, and for telling him the truth. Hugging her felt strange – she was such a small and fragile woman, and yet she'd fought a demon and won.

As he drove home, Alec tried to lay out the facts in some kind of logical order. But his mind kept going back to his teenage years, when he'd envied Willow for her exciting vampire-enriched lifestyle. Supernatural stuff had seemed _so cool_, in theory. Now it turned out that a demon had been shaping his life since he was a baby, taking his mother from him and maybe his brother too.

Be careful what you wish for, Alec thought bitterly.

Not wanting to worry his family, Alec managed to compose himself by the time he got back to the house. He had an early supper with his sisters, then washed the dishes while Jessie put Becca to bed. Jessie claimed the living room so she could study for finals; Alec gladly escaped to the spare room, and let his game face drop.

He booted up his laptop and checked his email, but Willow hadn't replied yet (no surprise; she'd warned him that she would have limited internet access in Bolivia). After several days of minimal sleep, his breakdown at the cemetery, and Louise's shocking revelations, Alec was too worn out to do anything else. Even though it was only 8pm, he fell into bed.

He'd email Ash in the morning, Alec decided: come clean about being one of the 1983 kids, tell him about Jake, and ask for his help. Together they'd track Jake down, and maybe find the other missing folks too. Alec wouldn't give up hope, not yet.

Sleep was approaching like a black wave. Alec closed his eyes, and let it take him.


	6. Chapter 6: Leverage & Supernatural, pt 2

**Chapter 6: Leverage & Supernatural, part 2**

**Summary:** A demon tried to abduct Alec Hardison, and succeeded in taking his identical twin Jake. But why does Alec's desperate search for answers lead him to a roadhouse in Nebraska?  
**Warnings:** swearing, angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death.  
**Spoilers:** for the pilot of _Leverage_, seasons 6 & 7 of _Buffy_, and seasons 1 & 2 of _Supernatural_.

* * *

**Alec Hardison and Ash, 2007 – 2008**

Alec sat on the stoop outside Nana's old house in Atlanta, deaf to the noise of neighborhood kids playing on the sidewalk. The May afternoon was warm, but the heat couldn't touch the cold fear inside him. Head in his hands, eyes closed against the bright sunshine, he kept going over recent events again and again in his mind.

Nana's death in February had been hard to accept, but at least it was a finite fact. Alec had been at her bedside hours before she passed, attended her funeral, and mourned at her grave.

When it came to his twin brother, though, _nothing_ was certain. A week ago, Jake Talley had simply vanished from a tent in a desolate Afghanistan valley. The Army assumed he was AWOL, and had either died or been captured by enemy forces. But Alec feared that a very different hostile force was at work: the yellow-eyed demon, who'd also tried to abduct Alec on the same day.

Alec had deployed all his criminal and computer skills since then, without success. He couldn't find any trace of Jake, dead or alive. The demon could have transported him anywhere in the world – or maybe even to Hell. There was no way for Alec to narrow down the parameters, and no trail of clues to follow.

He had turned to his old friend Willow for help, of course. Although she was still traveling in South America, her magic was powerful enough to span the globe. But even she hadn't been able to locate his brother. That didn't necessarily mean he was dead, Willow assured Alec over a crackly phone line from Peru. Jake could still be alive, and somehow shielded from her searching spells.

* * *

Alec had also planned to ask a newer friend for assistance: Ash, the guy who'd originally prompted him to start digging into his own past. But he'd stopped logging onto the forums around the time Jake disappeared. He hadn't answered his emails, either, not even the message where Alec admitted to being one of the 23-year-olds that Ash was looking for.

Alec might have assumed that Ash was pissed at him for not coming clean earlier...except that he definitely didn't seem the silent treatment type. And if Nana's friend Louise was right about the demon giving special powers to a bunch of kids born in 1983, and now kidnapping them, then maybe Ash had gotten too close to the truth in his research. So there was good reason to think that the timing of this week-long silence wasn't a coincidence – and good reason to be worried as hell.

Alec didn't know the guy's last name, or where he lived; he'd disguised his IP address so well that even Alec couldn't trace his location. But he knew that Ash was involved in the fight against paranormal phenomena. So Alec had paid close attention to his message boards over the last few days.

His hunch had paid off late last night. Someone had posted about the recent destruction of a roadside saloon in rural Nebraska, which was frequented by self-styled "hunters" of supernatural creatures.

A minute's googling confirmed that Harvelle's Roadhouse had been burnt to the ground, the day after the demon had paid his painful visit to Alec in Chicago and Jake in Afghanistan. Arson was suspected, but the local authorities hadn't ruled out an accidental gas leak – a strong sulfuric smell still hung around the site. Alec, who knew that sulfur could indicate the presence of demons, wasn't at all reassured by this news.

One of the bodies found in the ruins had been identified as Ashton Sinclair. Alec had spent this morning investigating, going so far as to hack into MIT's enrolment records. He'd proved beyond doubt that the late Ashton was the Ash he'd met online. It was one more piece of bad news to top off a truly shitty week.

Alec got up off the stoop, and went inside to grab his laptop. He had some bookings to make.

* * *

Alec got a flight to Omaha the next morning, then hired a car to head out to Nowhere, Nebraska. He didn't know what he hoped to find, exactly, but he had to do _something_. His foster-sisters were getting sick of him moping about the house, especially since he'd refused to tell them why he was so stressed and depressed.

Sheena had put him to work doing home maintenance, which at least kept his body usefully occupied. His brain was always churning away, though, and he was only getting a few hours of restless sleep per night. He felt worn down and worn out.

The burnt-out roadhouse was in the process of being demolished when Alec drove up. There was nobody else around except a middle-aged woman with dark blonde hair, leaning against a pick-up truck in the parking lot and grimly watching the bulldozer work. He'd seen her picture in the news reports - this was Ellen Harvelle, Ash's landlord and employer.

If she ran a hunters' hangout, Alec figured she must know about supernatural stuff. Maybe she would have some answers for him.

He walked across the parking lot to Mrs. Harvelle, and opened his mouth to introduce himself. But her expression made the words catch in his throat: she looked _horrified_ to see him. Without taking her eyes off his face, she reached for the shotgun lying on the pick-up's passenger seat, pumped it, and aimed it at his chest.

Alec froze, stunned and seriously confused. Had he wandered into some kind of white supremacist stronghold, or was this woman just crazy?

"Jake! How can you be back?" she demanded. "I watched those boys salt and burn your corpse."

Alec's mind reeled at hearing, point-blank, that his twin was dead. He'd sought answers, but not like this...

"Oh God, no," he gasped, putting a hand out to support himself against the side of the truck. It was stupid to make a sudden movement when faced with an armed woman whose hands were shaking, but right then Alec didn't care if she shot him.

The roadhouse owner frowned. "_Christo_," she exclaimed, and studied his reaction while Alec just stared back at her. Then she lowered her weapon slightly, and said, "Well, I'll be damned. Who are you?"

"Alec Hardison," he croaked. "I'm Jake Talley's twin."

"And how on earth did you wind up _here_?"

He'd had a whole introductory speech prepared, about chatting with Ash online and hoping to find out what happened to him. But in his state of shock, all he could say was, "Ash."

Her expression bleak, Mrs. Harvelle nodded at the charred wreckage of her business and home. "He was found in there – that answer your question?"

"Was it the demon?" Alec asked.

She looked at him sharply. "Yeah, it was." Then, to his relief, she flicked the safety on and put the shotgun back in the truck. "I'm Ellen," she said. "We need to talk. There's a diner five miles down the road; I'll meet you there."

* * *

It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, and the diner was deserted except for some truckers playing cards in a back booth. Alec and Ellen sat by the dusty front window, under a ceiling fan that creaked as it turned. He sipped soda and toyed with a slice of apple pie, not really hungry, while she topped up her strong black coffee with liquor from a flask.

"Sorry about earlier," Ellen said, "but it's been one hell of a week and I'm more than a little rattled. So how about you tell me what you know about Jake and the demon, and I'll fill in the gaps."

Alec laid it all out for her, as he had done for Louise a few days earlier. Ellen listened intently, asking questions here and there. When he explained about Nana's friend using magic to anchor him, Ellen looked impressed. She inspected his wrists, where the demon's red blisters and Louise's pale finger marks were fading but still visible.

"I wish we'd known about that spell," she sighed. "It sure would've helped Sam and Dean."

In response to Alec's questioning look, Ellen said that Sam Winchester was one of the 1983 kids and Dean was his older brother. Alec nodded, recognizing the name from his forums – the Winchesters were famous among hunters.

Sam had been abducted by the yellow-eyed demon a week ago, she continued, and taken to a ghost town in South Dakota. There, he met four other 23-year-olds with psychic powers...including Jake.

"You sure you want to hear this? It doesn't end well for your brother," Ellen warned him.

Alec took a deep breath. "I know, but I have to understand what happened. Not knowing would be worse," he said firmly.

Ellen only told him the bare bones, but it was bad enough. The demon had tried to turn his five captives against each other. It sounded like _Survivor_, except that the eliminated contestants died in horrible ways.

Jake had initially been Sam Winchester's ally, but the demon had appeared in a dream and convinced him that there could only be one winner. So Jake had attacked Sam, using his super-strength to his advantage. Drilled in fighting techniques since childhood, Sam had gained the upper hand just as Dean arrived to rescue him.

As Sam was staggering towards Dean, and freedom, Jake stabbed him in the back and then ran off. Sam had died in his brother's arms.

Alec winced at hearing this, shaking his head. He'd known that his twin had killed people before, as a soldier, but this was so much worse.

"Wait," he said suddenly. "If Sam died, how come you know what happened before Dean got there?"

"Because Sam didn't stay dead," she replied.

Alec blinked at Ellen, surprised by her matter-of-fact tone. "What, so he's a zombie now? Or a vampire?"

"No, nothing like that," she reassured him hastily. "Sam's alive, and still human, but you're better off not knowing the details as to _how_. Just thinking about it makes me sick."

Feeling nauseous already, he let it slide. "OK. So how did you meet Jake?"

Ellen explained that she'd been away from the roadhouse when it was torched by demons – it seemed that Ash's work in tracking a sudden shift in demonic activity had attracted their attention. The guy was too smart for his own good, Alec thought sadly. Then she'd traveled to another hunter's home base and met up with the Winchesters. Together, they'd worked out what the yellow-eyed demon wanted Jake to do.

A trail of omens led them to an abandoned pioneer cemetery in Wyoming, where they found Jake opening a portal to Hell. Ellen's voice shook as she described Jake using his newly-developed telekinesis to force her own gun against her temple.

Shit, Alec thought, no wonder she'd looked so afraid when he'd approached her in the parking lot. What a _nightmare_.

Sam had shot Jake in the back, repaying the favor, then Dean had killed the yellow-eyed demon. But hundreds of demons were released into the world before the hunters got the portal closed again.

Alec held his head in his hands, staring down at the table, as Ellen finished telling her story. He didn't want to believe that his twin was a bad guy, but the evidence was pretty damning.

He couldn't help wondering what would have happened without Louise's intervention. If the demon had reunited him with Jake in South Dakota, would Alec have resisted the temptation of psychic powers? And if it had come down to just the two of them, would Jake have killed him in order to win? Or could they have joined forces to combat the demon?

Some of what Alec was thinking must have shown in his face, because Ellen reached across the table and touched his arm. He looked up.

"I know that _What if?_ look," she said quietly, her expression sympathetic. "You can drive yourself crazy with hypotheticals after a death. But you can't change what happened, and you can't bring your brother back. Give yourself time to grieve, then try to let him go."

* * *

Alec exchanged contact details with Ellen, agreeing to let her know if anything else unusual happened to him. Then he set out west, for Wyoming. He didn't normally like wide open spaces; he was a city boy at heart. But driving along the straight interstate was a welcome relief, when his thoughts were so tangled and twisted.

After spending the night in a Cheyenne hotel, Alec followed Ellen's directions to the remote cowboy graveyard the next morning. To his relief, an early summer storm had already washed Jake's blood away. The only visible sign of the traumatic events Ellen had described was a large patch of disturbed soil. Jake and the yellow-eyed demon's vessel were buried here, side by side, in the first grave dug in the old cemetery for many decades.

Alec picked up some fallen branches, and hammered the sturdiest one into the ground with his tire jack. He used rope from the rental car's trunk to lash a shorter piece of wood to the longer one, forming a cross. He didn't know which side of the shared plot Jake was buried in, but it didn't matter...the poor bastard possessed by the demon deserved a memorial too.

He wished he could retrieve his brother's dog tags, to keep for himself or return to Jake's family down in Alabama. But even that small memento was lost to him. Ellen had told him that any personal object belonging to a deceased person could become haunted by their spirit. So the Winchesters had melted down the dog tags and all the other items Jake had on him, burying them with his incinerated remains.

Standing over the grave, Alec bowed his head and wiped away tears. It was awful to think that this was the closest he would ever get to his twin, after 23 years of unknowing separation. But at least he had learnt the truth about what had happened; at least he could say g

* * *

After his return to Atlanta, it was a couple more weeks before Alec felt strong enough to reach out to his brother's family. The Army had informed Jake's adoptive mother and sister that he was missing, of course, but Alec was pretty certain that they hadn't been told about the mysterious circumstances. And they sure as hell didn't know that Jake had been shot dead in Wyoming...by the guy he'd killed a few days before that, in South Dakota.

Alec had mixed feelings about contacting Mrs. Talley. He figured that she deserved to know that her boy was dead, so she wouldn't go on hoping in vain. But how could he possibly prove it? In the end, he wrote a short letter saying that he was her son's long-lost identical twin, had heard about Jake's disappearance, and wanted to meet his family.

He hadn't known what reaction to expect. But Jake's mom immediately invited him down to Birmingham, and welcomed him with open arms. Sitting next to her on the living room sofa was a weird experience for Alec; there were pictures of Jake everywhere, ranging from baby photos to a formal portrait in his Army uniform. And he was sure that meeting a stranger with her son's face was pretty surreal for Mrs. Talley too.

Jake's teenaged sister Danielle had burst into tears as soon as she saw Alec, running upstairs and slamming her door. Her mother had apologized, embarrassed, but Alec didn't blame the girl at all. The whole situation was fucked up.

It was hard for Alec to explain how he'd found out about Jake in the first place, without revealing his criminal misuse of federal databases. He just said that he'd been wondering about his birth family, and had discovered evidence that he and his brother had been separated as infants and sent to different foster homes.

Apparently the Talleys were never told that their adopted son had a twin, so Alec was pretty sure that Jake had no idea either. That was strangely comforting; it would have hurt to learn that Jake knew of Alec's existence, but hadn't tried to find him.

Then came the hardest part.

Alec put down his glass of tea and said, as gently as he could, "Mrs. Talley, I don't want to cause you any further pain. But I feel, in my heart, that Jake is gone. I can't explain it...I just _know_."

He was prepared to lie if she questioned him, claiming some psychic twin link, but he didn't have to.

"I know," Mrs. Talley replied, "I feel it too. Mother's intuition, maybe?" Then her composure broke, and she began to cry. Alec reached out tentatively, to put his hand over hers, but she leaned forward and rested her head against his shoulder.

So he wrapped his arms around Jake's mom, and grieved with her.

* * *

Alec had confided everything to Willow, of course – if there was anyone who could understand the shit he'd been through recently, it was her. He also passed on Ellen's information to Louise, letting her know what had happened to the other 1983 kids that her Christian network had been monitoring.

But he decided never to tell anyone else about Jake, let alone about the yellow-eyed demon. It was too private, too painful, and who would believe him anyway? He knew he should take Ellen's advice, and put the whole mess behind him.

Still, he did think long and hard about trying to find the Winchester brothers. They were obviously pretty good at covering their tracks, if the FBI had been chasing them for so long, but Alec had faith in his own skills. What good would it do to meet them, though? He would only hear more about his brother's betrayal of Sam, his cruelty to Ellen, and his role in opening the gate to Hell. And even if Sam did kill Jake, Alec owed Dean for killing the demon that had tormented him for months. In some weird sense, they were even.

Anyway, Alec wasn't sure that the Winchesters wouldn't just shoot him on sight, and check his ID later. It was probably best to leave them alone; they had plenty of work to do, hunting down all those demons that Jake had released.

* * *

Alec returned to Chicago, packing up and moving out of his apartment. He didn't sign another lease right away, though. Instead, he put his belongings into storage and went traveling.

Willow had suggested that he get away from familiar people and places for a while. Moving to England after Tara's death had really helped her come to terms with her loss and reassess her life, she said.

Alec took Willow's advice, and decided to take most of the next year off to see the world. He'd never left the US before, so he forged passports to match several of his squeaky-clean aliases. First he went to WorldCon in Japan, which was an epic multicultural geek-fest (and a huge amount of fun). After that, he traveled through Asia and the Middle East to Europe. He visited incredible places, but also witnessed terrible suffering which helped put his own troubles in some kind of perspective.

While he didn't want to give up crime altogether, Alec felt like he had to do something useful with the proceeds – and maybe atone for Jake's sins in some small way. So he started giving large sums of money away as he traveled. Nana had always supported her church's missionary work, even when she was struggling financially. Since Alec didn't share that devout faith, he decided to support NGOs doing development work in the poorer countries that he passed through.

He had a chance to do some good closer to home as well. In one of her regular emails, Mrs. Talley mentioned that she might lose her house without Jake's Army paycheck to supplement her income. So Alec offered to pay off her mortgage. Mrs. Talley was reluctant to accept charity, but he convinced her that he could afford it and that he wanted to help. He also set up a college fund for Jake's sister Danielle, who was apparently showing real promise in her high school language classes.

When he returned to Chicago in the spring, he moved into a new apartment. Then he eased back into things gradually, taking just a few select jobs that piqued his interest.

It took him a while to settle back into his old life, for the obvious reasons but also for an unexpected one: his extra-special technological capability was gone. It had kicked in when he was 22, around the time his nightmares had started, so it made sense that it had started to fade away after the demon's death.

The downgrade was actually a relief, in a way. It had freaked him out to have demon-bestowed powers. He preferred his usual skill level, which he had built up over time through study and hard work. He didn't mind just being incredibly talented, rather than _impossibly_ brilliant.

Alec was still good enough to crack almost any kind of computer security, and he still enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect of professional hacking. But he'd lost much of his competitive drive to be the world's best cyber-criminal...that pressing desire for success which had inspired him for so long.

What was the point? He already had more cash than he needed, and could easily get more. Anyway, it had never been about the profit for him, not really. Giving money away helped him feel a little better, but there was still something missing.

* * *

An unusual contract got Alec's attention late that summer. It was a corporate espionage job, with a twist: a senior guy at one aerospace company claimed that a competitor had stolen his airplane designs, and was hiring a crew to steal them back.

Alec's task would be to break into the competitor's R&D room, copy the data, and destroy the system and all the back-ups. Even with his diminished skills, he could probably do it one-handed after pulling a WoW all-nighter.

So far, so whatever...the intriguing part was his temporary teammates. Alec had heard of the thief who went by the single name Parker – she was a _legend_ among criminals. But he'd never met her, or even seen a picture. It would be interesting to find out if she was as crazy as her reputation suggested.

"Retrieval specialist" (whatever the hell that meant) Eliot Spencer was even more of a mystery. His name was an alias, of course, but it was an impressively solid one; only an expert like Alec could pick those documents as fake. He would bet that Spencer's identity had been created by the military, or some government agency with a three-letter name.

And the _really_ interesting part, which he found out just days before the crew convened, was that Nathan Ford would mastermind the whole operation. The brilliant insurance investigator was still the only authority figure who had ever caught Alec. But his life had imploded since then, and he'd lost his job at IYS. Now he was apparently freelancing in a morally gray kind of way.

Nate Ford, heading a team of thieves? Alec would have taken the contract just to see what happened; hell, he would have done it for free. The $300,000 he'd been offered was the icing on the cake.

Anyway, the job was going down right here in Chicago. If everything went to plan, Alec would be home and in bed long before dawn.

Getting his gear together before the team meet-up, he planned his approach. It'd be pointless to use an alias this time: Ford already knew his real name. Alec would introduce himself to the others as Hardison, though...no need to be on a first-name basis for a one-off job.

Alec slung his bag over one shoulder, switched the lights off, and left his apartment. It was nice out tonight, and he had plenty of time. After choosing a favorite playlist on his iPod, he began to walk to the rendezvous point downtown.


	7. Chapter 7: Leverage & Heroes, pt 2

**Chapter 7: Leverage & Heroes, part 2**

**Summary:** back in 2006, Alec Hardison couldn't understand how Nathan Petrelli won his Congress race. Seven years later, thanks to a chance encounter at ComicCon, he finds out.  
**Genre:** AU future!fic. Gen; mentions of Parker/Hardison, but no sexual content.  
**Warning:** references to canonical character death.  
**Spoilers:** for the first two seasons each of _Supernatural_, _Heroes_ and _Leverage_.

* * *

**Alec Hardison and Micah Sanders, 2013**

At age 30, Alec Hardison would describe himself as being pretty contented with his life. He was rich, he loved his job, and he had an awesome girlfriend.

But there were many mysteries that still bugged him. Why had a demon chosen him and his twin brother, Jake, when they were babies? Did that yellow-eyed bastard kill their mom deliberately, back in 1983, or was the deadly fire just an accident? And after Jake was abducted by the demon, was it his own free will or the demon's brainwashing that set him on the path to a violent death?

...on that scale of things, the mystery of how Nathan Petrelli had achieved a landslide win in his 2006 Congress race was _way_ down the list.

* * *

Alec met a guy called Micah when they grabbed adjacent seats for the Marvel panel at ComicCon 2013. They were lucky to get seats at all, because it was the most anticipated event of the entire con: Joss Whedon was due to reveal some juicy details about his next film. Joss really had changed Alec's negative opinion of comic book adaptations. He'd started off incredibly strong with _The Avengers_ the previous year, and Alec couldn't wait to see what he was going to do with the sequel.

Alec was wearing his faded old "Joss Whedon is my Master now" shirt with great pride. He was far from alone in expressing such devotion – many audience members wore similar T-shirts. Plenty of others were dressed as characters from Joss's first and most successful TV show, _Firefly_.

After the brilliant and hilarious Q&A session, both Alec and Micah joined the long line to get Joss's autograph. As the line slowly inched forward, they got talking. It turned out that Micah was studying computer science at MIT, as Alec had a decade before him. He was a real baby-faced kid – even at the end of his freshman year, he was still only 17.

Micah reminded Alec of a younger version of himself, in a lot of ways. But he seemed sadder and there was a definite wariness about him. Based on what little he revealed about his past, Alec could understand why. Both his parents had died when he was 11, Micah said, and he'd been raised by distant relatives since then.

Alec really felt for the kid. Though he himself was also an orphan, he'd lost his mother too young to actually remember her (and he'd never found out who his father was). But he still grieved for Jake and his foster-mother Nana, who had both passed away in 2007.

After two hours of waiting, the two of them finally got their _Firefly_ boxsets signed. Alec embarrassed himself by gushing at Joss like a teenage fanboy, while the actual teenage fanboy was much more restrained.

Micah and Alec had both come to the con alone, but they ended up wandering around the stalls and displays together for the rest of the day. They talked about comics, and computers, and the greatest pranks ever pulled by MIT students.

For Alec, who spent most of his offline time with people who didn't share his interests, it was a real treat. Parker had gotten much better at listening to him since they'd finally started dating a couple of years back (it had been a long wait, but totally worth it). Sometimes she was even willing to watch Alec's favorite shows and movies: she elbowed him in the ribs if he recited the dialogue out loud, but tolerated him silently mouthing along.

He loved being with Parker, of course, but it wasn't quite the same as hanging out with a _real_ geek.

* * *

It was a nice evening, even by SoCal standards, so Micah and Alec left the con venue and walked around San Diego for a while. A couple of hours later, they wound up in a mostly deserted 24-hour diner in a run-down part of town.

Alec was a multi-millionaire, but he didn't go for gourmet food unless Eliot was cooking. And he'd discovered, years ago, that most 5-star hotel kitchens were incapable of producing a decent cheeseburger. The menus in this joint were stained, the waitress was unfriendly, and there was a tang of stale grease in the air, but the food was _fantastic_.

As they ate, Alec and Micah continued to talk about superheroes. When they'd exhausted the Batman vs. Superman argument, the conversation turned to the ethical use of special abilities. Feeling pleasantly relaxed and deciding that he could trust Micah, at least a little bit, Alec offered a personal example.

"See, these days I'm one of the good guys," he said. "I use my skills to help people. But I've done some very dodgy things in my time."

Micah swirled a French fry through his leftover ketchup. "Did you do the dodgy things because you wanted to, or because you were forced to?"

"Mostly it was for money, or just for fun," Alec admitted. "But sometimes it was to help my Nana or my siblings."

"Yeah, I did things for my family too," Micah said softly, still looking down at his plate. Something about his tone of voice gave Alec goose bumps, despite the warm evening. "When I was 10, I was taken to New York by some seriously bad people. They kept me locked up, and said I could only see my mother again if I did something for them."

"Jesus, that's awful," Alec breathed, his mind suggesting lots of nasty reasons for criminals to kidnap a little boy.

"Oh, they didn't hurt me," Micah assured him quickly. "They just knew I was the only one who could solve their problem."

"Huh," said Alec. "OK, now I'm really curious. You don't have to tell me, but: what was the job?"

Micah hesitated for a moment, then described how he'd altered the outcome of one race during the 2006 midterms. He'd simply placed his hand on a single voting machine, and ordered it to register a vote for his kidnappers' preferred candidate. As all the machines were networked together, Micah had spread the message through the entire district's computer system. Result: instant landslide!

Having told his story, Micah slouched down in his seat and folded his arms, a resigned look on his face. He was probably expecting that Alec would either start laughing or freak out, and no wonder. Even to your average geek, manipulating electronics with a mere thought would seem like something out of sci-fi: an awesome concept, sure, but still impossible in the real world.

But Alec believed him, without question.

First of all, what Micah had said tallied perfectly with his own impression of Nathan Petrelli's upset victory 7 years earlier. Though Micah had been careful not to give specifics, Alec was certain that the unnamed candidate he'd gotten elected was Petrelli. Alec had figured that the race was rigged, at the time, but he'd never found any proof. Now it all made sense.

Secondly, Alec had come across all kinds of weird shit over the years. After vampires and witches and time-traveling aliens, not a lot surprised him anymore.

But most importantly, he himself had once possessed extraordinary power over technology, thanks to the yellow-eyed demon. Although it had faded after the demon's death, Alec still vividly remembered the feeling – like an organic connection between his mind and his

* * *

So it was curiosity rather than doubt that made Alec lean forward and say, "Man, it sucks that you had to do that. But your power sounds totally cool...can you show me?"

Micah looked surprised, but then quirked an eyebrow and smiled. "Give me your MP3 player," he replied, "and name any track that's on it."

Alec laid his iPod on the table, and chose a Hall & Oates classic he hadn't listened to for ages. Micah placed a fingertip on one corner of the device, and closed his eyes. Two seconds later, he passed Alec the earbuds. Alec was amazed to hear the song start playing, even though Micah hadn't moved the scroll wheel or touched the screen.

Alec put down the earbuds, sat back in the booth, and blew out his breath. He'd thought that he was pretty gifted, but this kid was truly in a class of his own. Speaking of which...

"So why are you bothering to get a computer science degree?" Alec asked. "With a talent like that, you could just walk into any IT company and name your starting salary."

Alec, trained by Sophie to read body language, saw Micah relax a little. He seemed relieved that Alec wasn't asking the more obvious questions about his past or his power.

"Well, I did try applying for jobs last year, after finishing high school early. But things are different these days, compared to when you were a kid," Micah replied (ignoring Alec's indignant "Hey, I'm not that old!"). "Almost everyone grows up computer literate, so self-taught teenagers aren't so special anymore. The industry now prefers well-trained graduates to unmanageable prodigies."

Alec could understand that. If he'd been hired right out of high school, he probably would have been incredibly arrogant. Hell, he'd had a major insubordination problem even _after_ four years of college; his attitude had gotten him fired from three graduate jobs, before he'd given up on respectability and turned to crime.

Micah stopped to sip his soda. "So with no work history or references, the only interviews I got were at electronics stores – selling laptops to old ladies for minimum wage. Honestly, I'd rather sit through CS 101."

"I'm guessing you didn't demonstrate your ability in the job interviews," Alec said.

"No way; it's far too risky to show just anyone. There are people who'd want to use me as a guinea pig...or make me do far worse things than rig an election."

Touched by Micah's implied trust in him, Alec recognized that there was still a lot that the kid wasn't saying – so much pain and bitterness behind his calm expression.

Alec knew better than to push for more, though, especially since he wasn't ready to reveal his own secrets. And his brief brush with a superpower made him even more sympathetic to Micah's predicament. After all, the demon hadn't given special talents to Alec and the other 1983 kids out of the kindness of his non-existent heart. He'd had an evil plan in place, and almost all of them had wound up dead because of it...including Jake.

"There's a practical problem, too," Micah continued, wrenching Alec's attention back to the present. "Whether you're programming or fixing problems, you're supposed to document the process. But nobody else can replicate, or reverse, or even understand what I do."

Alec nodded his understanding. Finishing a tricky job in minutes rather than days would certainly impress people, but might soon lead to very awkward questions (especially if there was no trail of coding to follow).

"So you're learning the usual way to control computers, as a cover," he said approvingly. "Like Superman, hiding in plain sight behind a meek geek persona."

Micah grinned. "Pretty much, yeah. Anyway, at MIT I get to hang out with people who love technology, argue about superheroes, and quote _Firefly_ at each other. And I'm actually learning some stuff, even if it all seems so slow compared to what I'm used to."

"So are you going to aim for programming jobs once you graduate?"

Micah made a petulant face, reminding Alec just how young he was. "I probably should, to stay under the radar. But I might get bored pretty fast. And the temptation to take shortcuts could become overwhelming."

"Not to sound patronizing or anything," Alec said, "but I'm impressed that you're even considering an honest career. With very little effort, you could steal more money than you could spend in a lifetime."

"I've definitely thought about it," Micah confessed. "I raided ATMs a few times as a kid when we were desperate for cash, and both my parents spent time in jail. But my dad went straight and became a firefighter, because he wanted to help people. He even got a medal for bravery! And my mom died while she was saving someone's life. So I feel like I'd be letting them both down if I just took money without working for it."

Micah rubbed at his eyes, sniffing quietly, and Alec felt a powerful surge of sympathy that he didn't know how to express. To give his new friend a moment of privacy, Alec went over to check out the diner's dessert selection. The pecan pie looked good, so he ordered two slices and headed back to their booth. He pushed one plate across to Micah, who managed a small smile of thanks, and then ate his own serving in silence as he thought about his next move.

* * *

Micah's desire not to abuse his extraordinary ability made Alec want to reveal his own altruistic efforts. But years of working with Eliot, professional paranoiac, had made him a lot more cautious. He wasn't lone-wolfing it anymore; he had to protect the others by treading carefully here.

"You don't need to make a black-or-white choice between boring IT work and outright theft," he finally said. "There's a middle path, which can often involve thrilling heroics!" Micah smiled, recognizing the _Firefly_ quote, and Alec continued.

Without naming names, he told Micah about his crew – how they'd started as a bunch of criminals and one honest man who'd joined forces for a one-off job, then decided to make it a more permanent arrangement. Together, they worked to punish powerful individuals and corporations who victimized ordinary folks.

Alec and his friends hadn't exactly gone straight, though. They still committed crimes – often multiple felonies during any given job – and ran significant risks. But they did it all to help people who were out of options.

Micah seemed fascinated by the idea of putting his talent to use in such a way, and he prompted Alec for examples of the team's work.

Keeping all his references vague, Alec described some of the cases they'd handled: fighting political corruption, preventing companies from selling dangerous products, and taking down organized crime bosses. Having lived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Micah was especially pleased to hear about their exposé of crooked construction firms involved in the rebuilding effort.

"With your ability," Alec concluded, "you wouldn't even need to work with anyone else. You could find victims online, verify their stories, drain the finances of whoever caused the problem, and transfer the money to an untraceable offshore account in the victim's name. And you could probably do it all in your PJs, sitting on the couch."

"Yeah, I probably could," Micah said, "but it sounds very isolated. I'd prefer to be part of a group, like you."

As they kept talking about Micah's options, Alec couldn't help remembering how envious he'd been of his friend Willow's "Scooby Gang" as a teenager. He'd dreamed of being the tech guy for such a tight-knit crime-fighting crew one day. With the Leverage team, he'd achieved that goal for himself; now, he was encouraging another lonely young geek to follow his example. It felt kinda good, in one way – the passing of the torch and all that. But God, he felt so _old_.

Alec got a shock when he next checked his watch: they'd been at the diner for hours, and it was nearly 4am. He had to be at the airport by 8am for a flight back to Leverage HQ.

On the way back to their hotel, Alec gave Micah his contact details and suggested that they should stay in touch. He didn't know how much he could really offer Micah, in terms of contacts or career guidance. But he figured that the kid might just need to talk to someone who knew the truth and could empathize.

Alec's motives weren't entirely selfless, either. He'd never told any of his teammates about the demon and the ability he'd once possessed, even though sometimes the secret felt like too huge a burden to carry alone. Parker was the only one who knew that he'd had a twin – Alec had revealed his loss several years ago, after she talked about the death of her own brother when they were children. Even then, all he'd said was that Jake was killed while serving in Afghanistan. It was technically true, but far from the whole truth.

But he felt a strange kinship with Micah. Maybe this 17-year-old genius, who had such power but had lost so much, could understand better than anyone. Maybe he and Alec would be able to help each other.

* * *

In a cab heading for San Diego airport, a few hours later, Alec closed his eyes and thought about how his oddly nomadic life had almost come full circle.

He was on his way back to Chicago, the team's 4th home base in 5 years. Boston had become too hot for them, after that whole mess with the crooked mayor and the Feds, so they'd moved down to Washington. The location was handy for dealing with political corruption cases, and sadly there had been no shortage of work.

But their endeavors had made them some powerful enemies inside the Beltway. A few had been put behind bars, while others had threatened revenge after public scandals (carefully choreographed by Nate) cost them their seats in 2012. Getting the hell out of Dodge had seemed wise, so they'd relocated to Chicago following the election.

The Windy City was where the team had originally joined forces, back in 2008. Alec's feelings about returning were mixed. He liked Chicago (despite the cold winters), but he'd also been stalked and attacked by the yellow-eyed demon while living there. So he'd chosen a building on the other side of town from the apartment with all those negative associations.

Alec hadn't just moved away from his old life...he'd moved _up_. His new place was the penthouse suite of a deluxe lakefront development. He and Parker could lie in bed and watch the weather roll in across the water. She still had her own base – a converted warehouse which Alec was rarely allowed to visit – but she stayed with him most nights.

Parker had gradually become used to sharing a bed, and to the everyday compromises that went with cohabitation. It felt a little bit like domesticating a wild creature, sometimes, when Alec had to explain regular things such as loading the dishwasher and sorting the recycling.

But mostly it felt like being in love with an unpredictable but amazing woman.

He hadn't seen his girl for a couple of weeks now, and he really missed her. The team had taken a well-deserved summer break, scattering to the four winds. Parker had said something about Swiss bank vaults being the ultimate challenge for a thief, kissed Alec goodbye, and hopped on a flight to Zurich. Within a week, a number of safety deposit boxes at Switzerland's most secure banks had been breached.

The Swiss authorities were baffled: why would someone go to all that trouble, just to take a single small item from certain vaults? But Alec knew why, and it made him so proud. Parker had resisted the overwhelming temptation to steal everything in sight. Instead, she'd targeted the accounts of seriously bad guys – like dictators and warlords – and limited herself to one souvenir from each (a large diamond here, a miniature Egyptian statue there).

More importantly, she'd left messages telling the vault owners to start redistributing their ill-gotten wealth before she came back and did it for them. It was a real measure of how far Parker had come from her days as an amoral thief who stole indiscriminately. And if the warning didn't prompt a surge in charitable donations, the threatened follow-up gave Parker something to look forward to on her next European vacation...

Alec had used his time off in a more traditional kind of way, visiting family and friends. He'd spent a week in Atlanta with his sisters and niece – he couldn't believe little Becca was in first grade already – and paid his respects at Nana's grave.

Then he'd headed out to California for ComicCon. He'd detoured via Silicon Valley to see his old friend Mac, who was fulfilling her long-held dream of working for Apple. There was apparently only one downside: she had to go by her long-disused real name (Cindy) at the office, because "Mac" was too common a nickname at Apple HQ. Alec found that hilarious, and didn't stop laughing until she threatened to create a specially tailored virus that would fry his iPhone.

Alec left northern California $200,000 poorer, after Mac persuaded him to provide venture capital for her friend Wallace's engineering start-up. He'd met the guy a few times, and found his mechanical aptitude very impressive. So if Wallace thought he could design an individual jetpack that ran on biofuel, then Alec wanted to help him try.

Though he personally hated heights, Alec knew that Parker would be ridiculously excited by the prospect of flying. As a key investor, maybe he could get her an early prototype for some future birthday.

Alec had also wanted to catch up with Willow, still a close friend although they rarely met in person. She now lived in London, where she and Buffy ran the new improved Watchers' Council for the worldwide network of vampire Slayers. But she visited Los Angeles several times a year to liaise with a highly successful evil-fighting team there. The crew was headed, bizarrely, by a 250-year-old vampire and a Slayer who'd served time for murdering innocent people. Alec guessed they were proof of Nate's maxim: sometimes bad guys made the best good guys.

Unfortunately Alec's stint in California wouldn't coincide with one of Willow's trips, but she'd promised to see him the next time she was in the States. If she came to Chicago, then he really would have circled back to the beginning. The two of them had first met there, some 15 years earlier, at the National Science Fair.

It was strange to realize just how much that chance encounter had shaped his life. He'd been a nerd whose social skills lagged behind his technical know-how, but meeting Willow had made him feel less alone. She'd shown him how to hack, then taught him about the supernatural. And she'd encouraged him to use his talents to help other people. It had taken 10 years, but he'd finally taken that advice after joining forces with the Leverage crew.

Alec opened his eyes as the cab neared the airport. Grabbing his phone, he made a note to look up the organizers of that 1998 fair. If he could find out who had allocated his and Willow's exhibits to adjacent tables, he'd send them a thank you present. They'd inadvertently done him a huge favor...so really, a nice gift basket was the _least_ he could do in return.


End file.
